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smokeybrandreviews · 4 years

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Cheeseburgers

The Infinity Saga is over. The MCU is moving forward into uncharted waters. Disney+ has pushed back certain shows and moved up WandaVision. Black Widow finally has a well deserved movie, postmortem. The future is wide open but, before we get on a brand new pain train, i wanted to take a look back and talk about some of my favorite movies from the first eleven years of the MCU.

Avengers: Infinity War

This movie, man, is probably peak MCU. There are better films in the series but you’ll be hard-pressed to find a film that walks the line of comic book and cinema to deftly. This is the penultimate tale for that first decade and what a f*cking climax it was. Holy sh*t! There was just so much good in this film, from character development to visual flair to legitimate stakes. I’m a massive Marvel fan and i am well aware of the Infinite Gauntlet saga in the comics but seeing this sh*t? Seeing Thanos actually Snap? I never though in a million years that would happen onscreen. And then it did. It was at that point i absolutely knew the MCU was about that life. I knew to expect the unexpected because , with the wealth of the Marvel universe to draw from, they were going to craft some motherf*ckers of stories.

Like, I f*cking cried when Pete got dusted. I shed legitimate tears and I’m not even embarrassed to say it out loud. For a film to move me like that? and it’s not Forrest Gump? Motherf*cker had to be on point, for sure. The entire theater was silent as those strings hummed and Thanos sat on his farm, smiling contently. I had never experienced that before The entire auditorium - completely silent. We were in disbelief. We were in mourning. I saw Infinity War in theaters four times and literally every time, the same thing happened. In two hours and some change, Marvel had gave a theater full of people straight emotional trauma. Your movie has to be absolutely on point for that to occur.

Speaking of Thanos, yo, how was this big ass purple grimace looking motherf*cker one of the best antagonists of film, period? How was this cat written so well? I lost my sh*t when they teased him at the end of Avengers and that little bit we got of him in Guardians was cool but i was not prepared for how goddamn formidable he turned out to be. Josh Brolin brought this character to life but the writing gave me real agency. I was flabbergasted by how great this character turned out to be. Thanos felt real. He felt flawed. He felt legitimate. Id have to put him up there with The Dark Knight Joker and Hans Landa as one of the best antagonists ever.

Spider-Man: Homecoming

I adore Spider-Man. Ive written at length about that love. He’s the reason i even picked up that Marvel comic all those years ago. I’ve seen every cinematic iteration of Webhead and i mst say, this portrayal is the truest to the source material i have ever seen. Cats get on the MCU about making him Tony Stark jr. but most people don’t understand that’s where he was going anyway. Most people don’t know that, in the comics, he’s basically Reed Richards jr. and since the MCU has no Reed, Tony is a pretty smart substitute. But that argument is inconsequential because the core of who Spider-Man is, the actual spirit of the character, has been captured so perfectly by this version of Pete, it’s borderline miraculous. I love Tobey McGuire’s take in Pete because he was the first to do it. Kind of like how i have such nostalgia for the 89 Batman. That version of Spider-Man felt like the old Lee/Ditko version from the 60s. Andrew Garfield was adequate. He didn’t get a fair shake though, mostly barbecue the writing in his run was so goddamn terrible. But this new kid? This casting was as perfect as RDJ was to Iron Man.

Tom Holland kills it as Spider-Man. His version of the character feels right. It feels modern. It feels like Ultimate Pete but grounded in the spirit of the 90s cartoon version. He’s this massive geek, this kid really, granted power in tragedy and it feels so goddamn authentic, i couldn’t believe it. The second he showed u in Civil War, i absolutely knew Underoos was about to be a star in these films and that is saying a lot considering how loaded this cast has become. Homecoming was the first film we got to see Pete stretch his legs and it was f*cking brilliant. Everything about this movie is what a great Spider-Flick should be and the MCU nailed it! if i never got another Spidey appearance, this movie was more than enough to sate my appetite. Homecoming is my second favorite MCU movie. I loved every second of it!

Also, how about that Aunt May stinger, though?

Captain America: The Winter Soldier

Look, i love the Dark Knight. For me, that is the pinnacle of a capeflick. That movie was a great crime thriller first, a Batflick second. Nolan approached it with a grounded sense of reality that left you, as an audience, breathless. It is one of the best films i have ever seen in my entire life and Ledger gave one of the most brilliant performances ever captured on celluloid. There is nothing as good as that film in the MCU. The Winter Soldier comes f*cking close, though. This movie made me sit up and realize that the MCU had some teeth. Until this thing came out, i thought we were going to get a bunch of flamboyant costumes and snarky Wedonisms. I wasn’t mad, mind you, Avengers was dope, but Winter Soldier took all that campy bullsh*t out back and murdered it. This movie was the MCU growing up and almost everything afterward has been brilliant. The Winter Soldier forced everyone to step their game up with how goddamn brilliant it turned out to be. I can’t say there were any performances as great as Ledger’s Joker but i can make the argument the overall writing was better than The Dark Knight, and that is stupid high praise.

Guardians of the Galaxy

This film has no right to be as good as it is. I went into this thing on a whim, mostly because I thought it was going ti be filler like Ant-Man or something, and then it wasn’t. It was great. Legitimately great. I had no idea the MCU could take a C-rate team like the goddamn Guardians and uplift them so beautifully. James Gunn took those characters and wrote the best Star Wars film since f*cking Empire and I didn’t think that was possible, not with this wayward branch of Marvel History. Seriously, if you do even a minuscule amount of research on who the Guardians are, they’re a joke. I mean, they have a f*cking talking Raccoon on the team! Gunn had the wherewithal to lean into that and he produced one of the best in the entire MCU. He took these loser clowns and injected so much emotion and humanity into them, you couldn’t help but love their rag-tag asses. This was the first MCU movie to move me to tears. That stuff about Quills mom? I felt that. Both times. On an extremely personal level. I was the young Quill. I watched my grandma, the only person who i believe loved me unconditionally up to that point, die just like Quill’s mom; Cancer and everything. I was about his age when it happened, too. That sh*t f*cked me up. To this day, i have nightmares about it. Seeing that sh*t so accurately captured in a capeflick was the most for me and I legit had to leave the theater until the first part of the movie passed. To this day, i can’t watch that scene. I can just barely make it through the Dance of to Save Th Universe, but that opening gambit? No way. It hits way too close to home for me. Still, for a comic book movie to solicit such a response? It has to be special and Guardians is one of the best.

Iron Man

Boy, we’ve come a long way since Tony Stark uttered those fateful word, “I am Iron Man.” But none of these other films would even have the opportunity to exist if he hadn't said them. Iron Man had the tall order of being the first, proper, MCU film AND compete with The Dark Knight. N one thought a film about B-List superhero, narcissistic billionaire, and straight up lush, Tony Stark, would amount to anything. How wrong everyone turned out to be. I knew, from that second i saw the teaser and concept art by Adi Granov, that Marvel was taking this sh*t crazy serious. Then there’s the casting of Robert Downey Jr. That sh*t was a boon, for real. The entire cast of this first film was impeccable but RDJ makes this movie. He IS Tony Stark. Even before he got comfortable with the character like in the later films, fresh out the box with the scripts, you can tell he knows how to bring this tinkerer to life. You had to nail that aspect in order to have any chance to build something great and Marvel hit a goddamn bullseyes, for sure. Revisiting this flick, Iron Man isn’t as good as the later films in the Infinity Saga but it still holds up against the vast majority of entries and that’s saying something.

I love these films, man. As a geek growing up reading these stories, reenacting them with their action figures, sitting glued to the television every Saturday as their cartoons aired, I never imagined id see such a berth of fantastic media brought to life on the silver screen. Seriously, some of my favorite interpretations of these characters appear exclusive in the MCU. War Machine, Thor until recently, Ant-Man, f*cking Hulk? i never gave these assholes the time of day in the comics but in the MCU? They’re fantastic! And it has everything to do with how well written they are in-universe. There are over twenty films in this run an i love all of them to varying extents. Spider-Man: Far From Home, Black Panther, Captain America: Civil War, Avengers: Endgame, Thor: Ragnarok, and Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 2 all could have made this list. For sure, they’re 6 - 11 or whatever, but that speaks to the sheer depth of the MCU. I’m not even counting flicks i would consider B-tier like Captain Marvel or Avengers or Iron Man 3 or Doctor Strange; All of which are still dope in their own right.

There is just SO much great in these films and i can’t wait to see where we go next. With Disney acquiring Fox, Marvel finally has the full toy box to play with and i am absolutely a tizzy with the potential arcs they can adapt. Secret Wars? Annihilation? Age of Apocalypse? Avengers Disassembled? Dark Reign? F*cking Onslaught?? I have no idea where we are going but i am, for sure, jumping on this pain train once again.

#Marvel #MCU #Infinity Saga

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smokeybrand · 4 years

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Cheeseburgers

Avengers: Infinity War

Spider-Man: Homecoming

Also, how about that Aunt May stinger, though?

Captain America: The Winter Soldier

Guardians of the Galaxy

Iron Man

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theheavymetalmama · 5 years

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And now, some Unpopular Opinions!

Because at this point, why the hell not?

Iron Man was better than The Dark Knight

I am in no way, shape, or form suggesting that The Dark Knight is a bad movie. Far from it, in fact. It’s a damn good movie with some fantastic performances, a gripping story, and some of the best written characters and dialogue in the history of movie making. So is Iron Man the better movie? For one, it’s not so stuck up its’ own ass about its’ message. The Dark Knight is a lot of things and one of them is pretentious as fuck, come off as less of a love letter to Batman and more of a method of the director Chris Nolan showing how much he has nothing but contempt for superheroes and comic books in general. Iron Man, in contrast, embraces it and has fun with the idea of a guy who builds a mech suit and fights bad guys. There’s also the question of influence, and that right there is no contest. The Dark Knight influenced Batman; Iron Man influenced the entire movie industry.

Final Fantasy XV was a massive disappointment

I kind of feel bad for dunking on this game considering they just cancelled the last of the DLC. Then again the last of the DLC was going to expand on Lady “Show Up and Blow Up” Lunafreya and Aranea “I’m here and now I’m not” Highwind’s stories and now we’re not getting them and I’m still bitter as fuck for the director’s pathetic excuse for why a girl couldn’t attend the coming of age road trip, so all bet’s are off! Okay, the ladies getting shafted aside, there is a lot to like about Final Fantasy XV, but was it worth the tedious development time? No way in hell. The game looks good but like many open world games feels mostly lifeless and empty, and of the four main characters only one of them is likable and isn’t even playable in the game’s vanilla form. The story is a broken mess that requires other forms of media to fully grasp (dick fucking move there, Squeenix) and the summons coming at random times serves as more of an annoyance than anything, especially since they always seem to show up except during times when and where they’d be useful. It also doesn’t say good things about a company’s management when a game can sell millions of copies in record time as well as do gangbusters on downloadable content and then still manage to lose over 30 million dollars.

And for the record, let it be known that Noctis is far and away the whiniest and most emo protagonist in Final Fantasy history, which is saying something considering this is a series where one such protagonist’s entire character is being so jaded and world weary to the point that his name is the sound a crying baby makes, and he doesn’t whine and complain as much as Noctis does.

Just because you’re a cop or a soldier, that doesn’t automatically make you a good person

I’m in favor of police and law enforcement and even though I believe our military budget makes Caligula himself look frugal in comparison I do support our troops. Having said that, being a cop or a trooper doesn’t mean jack shit if the person under the uniform is a complete and utter scumbag, which happens more often than many care to admit. In fact some people, many people, become cops and soldiers not to protect and serve or out of a sense of honor and duty, but simply because they like making others miserable and want to do it for a living. There’s a reason songs about fighting the law and unflattering depictions of authority figures date back as far as authority figures have been a thing. Respect is earned, not given.

‘White Nationalist’ and ‘Nazi’ are the same things

Calling a Nazi a white nationalist is like calling somebody who abuses their spouse a rough lover. Stop beating around the bush and tell it like it is. Also, don’t debate Nazis, punch them. Punch them as hard as you fucking can. If they punch you back, punch them again, and again, and again until they either run away (which most of them do) or stop moving. Trust me, nobody is going to miss them. That goes double for the alt right. Oh, and speaking of which...

Far Cry 5 chickened out

As somebody who grew up in a dead gold mining community that was mostly Catholic, when the first trailer for Far Cry 5 came out I was stoked as hell for the chance to gun down religious fanatics and skinheads in a place in rural America that didn’t look all that different. Then the game came out and it was abundantly clear to anybody that something somewhere in the game was changed at the last minute. Some have argued that it was their intention from the get go, others claimed they didn’t want to alienate their core demographic. It doesn’t say nice things about your core demographic if you’re worried about depictions of white supremacist cultists scaring them away, but okay, fine. Then make a game that takes place during the decline of the Ku Klux Klan, or in a post World War II Europe where you hunt Nazi war criminals, or failing that make something akin to Black Dynamite or a wacky 70′s Kung Fu movie where everything is purposefully over the top and exaggerated, I don’t care! All your other games have you gunning down hordes of brown people, let people like me and my husband kill some skinheads god damn it!

If you still support Donald Trump after all the vile and abhorrent things he’s done, you’re a bad person

There’s no beating around the bush on this one. I don’t blame people who were swooned by this conman thinking he’d genuinely make a good president and have since regretted their decision. I have nothing but sympathy for them. No, I’m talking about the people who STILL trip over themselves to defend this vile, homophobic, delusions, misogynist, narcissistic bigot. Like when he called Nazis “very fine people,” or is still pushing for a stupid wall along our border that will be bested by two extension ladders and a pair of tin snips. The travel ban, the rollback on regulations that kept food insecure people fed, kids dying in his fucking concentration camps, yeah, no. He’s a treasonous scumbag who deserves to be locked in an 8x8 cell until he rots, and if you still support him then you can claim the top bunk.

Climate change is real and coal can fuck off

Coal is dead. Let it lay down and rot. What, coal is your only source of income in the area you live in? Then move somewhere else! You think I would have left my hometown if there were any opportunities other than timber, fishing, and tourist traps? Sorry, but the longer we stay in the past with coal the lesser we can look forward to a future where a planet can sustain human life. If we want our planet to live then coal needs to die.

No, the left isn’t “just as bad” as the right

This is a fucking gas lighting farce that immediately falls apart when put under scrutiny. Are there extremists and crazies on the left? Of course there are, but they’re entirely different beasts as those found on the right. The left is more of a “eat enough kale and you can talk to dolphins” or “sleep with crystals under your bed and you can see the future” kinds of crazy, whereas the right is more of the “kill all the queers and let the brown babies starve” kind of crazy. Oh, and to each and every single person who said “Clinton is just as bad as Trump,” y’all can cover your reproductive organs in honey and stick them in a mason jar filled with live bullet ants and tarantula hawks, you ignorant scare mongering shitheels!

“Captain Marvel doesn’t smile!”

So what? She’s a space Navy Seal, not a boy scout like Captain America or Superman; she’s not supposed to smile.

No, the ‘alt left’ doesn’t exist and Antifa aren’t the same as Nazis

Are Antifa breaking the law? Yes. Should they be held accountable for their actions? Yes. Are people who want to kill Nazis exactly the same as people who want to exterminate the Jews and subjugate anybody who isn’t white while wiping other people’s culture off the face of the Earth under an authoritarian rule? Hell to the no and “Antifa is just as bad as the Nazis” is right up there with “Vaccinations cause autism” and “the Earth is flat” on the scale of “If you believe this, you are STUPID.” If Nazis and white supremacists went unopposed they’d go around raping and murdering Jews and non whites until there were absolutely none of them left. You know Antifa would be doing if there weren’t any Nazis around? Sitting in their crappy apartments smoking weed, sipping craft beer, eating pizza, and laughing their asses off at 20 year old Saturday Night Live skits. Ooooooh, scary! Yes, Antifa are assaulting people and destroying public property and yes they should be held accountable for their actions. But I’m not going to pretend, even hypothetically, that Nazi apologist scumbags like Tucker Carlson having his door banged on or actual Nazis like Richard Spencer getting punched in the face is on the same playing field as babies being put in cages, innocent black people being murdered by cops, or Jews being put into ovens, you fucks!

New She Ra is better than Old She Ra and 80′s cartoons in general

If you don’t like the new She Ra and prefer the old one, fine, you do you, but don’t act like the original is “So much better” because it isn’t at all. The villains were jokes, the animation was beyond cheap, the characters all looked the same, there were stupid talking animal sidekicks, and the story went nowhere really fucking fast outside of “Bad guys are doing bad guy stuff, our heroes must stop them” because they were commercials to sell toys. Nothing more, nothing less. If the new She Ra isn’t your bag then that’s all well and good, but don’t be a stupid asshole about it, talking about how it wasn’t featured at PowerCon like it’s a big fucking deal when only sad dorks like us give a shit about conventions, or whine about how you’re being oppressed and censored because a 16 year old isn’t rocking 44DD’s, or talk about “CalArts style” like that’s a real goddamn thing. Oh yeah, and speaking of which...

“CalArts style” is not a thing

Shut the fuck up, no it isn’t. It’s a stupid, meaningless buzzword hurled at people who never fucking went to CalArts in the first place. If you’re perplexed as to why modern cartoons all look like Steven Universe, the simple fact is that cartoons are made predominantly for children and shows are made to be aesthetically pleasing to them. With shows like Adventure Time, Regular Show, Steven Universe, Star vs the Forces of Evil, and Gravity Falls being soaring success stories while shows like Young Justice, new GI Joe, and 2011 Thundercats ambitious failures, it’s obvious that formal abstractionist non angularity is in while aspirational human physical fitness is out, and a big reason the latter was even a thing in the first place is because they were toy commercials first and there were only so many variations on plastic molds to form the fucking action figures and because it was the 80′s and Arnold was the biggest star at the time.

“Star Wars: the Last Jedi” is a good movie and fanboys can eat bantha poodoo

I’ve heard all the reasons for why The Last Jedi is a bad movie and they’re all either stupid nitpicky bullshit or meaningless fanboy gripes. I could write an entire essay debunking those reasons point for point, like how the reason Holdo didn’t tell Poe a damn thing because no admiral would ever a tell a lowly grunt anything about their plan, especially after being demoted for being a hotheaded little fuckup. Or that Rey being related to Obi Wan or any previous Star Wars character didn’t happen because that would have been stupid and the definition of predictable. Or that the reason Akbar didn’t do the suicide run is because he’s a meme that the general audience doesn’t give a shit about and that there’s no way in Hell that the Mouse would allow a character named “Akbar” to do a suicide run. Or that Kylo Ren not being an intimidating villain is the whole point and that you’re supposed to hate him because he’s a petulant Darth Vader wannabe and a snake to boot. Or that the effectiveness of said suicide run, where Snoke came from, or the state of the Resistance by the end of the movie, or that any other so called ‘plot hole’ doesn’t matter because this is a movie about space wizards for children and paying obsessive attention to meaningless and pedantic details is exactly how we end up with stupid subplots in the Beauty and the Beast remake and Metropolis and Gotham City being across the river from each other! But the biggest one is Luke wasn’t portrayed as some Jedi Clint Eastwood (why fanboys want that eludes me; the EU did that a few times and they were all terrible) and that him exiling himself doesn’t make any sense.

Sorry, but no, Luke running off to a far and unreachable island makes perfect sense. For one, it’s kind of a thing that disgraced Jedi do, and for two, Star Wars is a fairy tale in space. All of the characters draw inspiration from characters and archetypes from fairy tales and fables of old, and the one Luke Skywalker resembles most (largely by design) is King Arthur. Think about it. Common boy who doesn’t know who his real parents are, meets an old wizard, gets a legendary sword, discovers he’s of noble lineage, tags along with a few colorful characters, goes on a quest that’s bigger than him and the life he knew, hits a few bumps down the road, and then eventually he saves the kingdom by overthrowing his father who once was a great man and a hero but gave in to power and corruption and became a dark reflection of his former self.

You will never unsee that.

Oh yeah, and remember how things turned out for King Arthur in the end? He started a whole new kingdom, he had a few good years, he grew arrogant, things started to fall apart, and suddenly he and everything he worked to build up were undone overnight by a younger, more vindictive relative. Disgraced, Arthur was whisked away to an unreachable island deep rooted in his own legend and mythology where he remained until Britain had fallen to darkness and needed him again. Now of course Britain as we know it has yet to see such a thing (we’ll see how Brexit turns out) but Luke did exactly that. And no, sorry fanboys, but The Last Jedi wasn’t a failure in any sense of the word. It grossed over a billion dollars, received critical praise, the DVDs and BluRays sold like hotcakes, and was adored by kids, teenagers, and young adults, the primary audience that Star Wars is for in the first place. And I don’t give a shit what the audience score on RT says, because for one aggregate sites are a blight on film criticism and we went from this;

“Batman v Superman and Suicide Squad are AMAZING, Rotten Tomatoes is biased and paid off by Disney!”

To this...

“Star Wars: the Last Jedi is TERRIBLE, Rotten Tomatoes says so!”

In just over a year. To say nothing of the fact that what you’re currently saying about The Last Jedi was also said about The Empire Strikes, and like ‘Empire’ twenty years from now people will look back on the fanboy outrage and say “Wow, what a bunch of babies.” And before the inevitable response...

“But Solo bombed because of The Last Jedi!”

Nooooo, Solo bombed because it came out right between Infinity War and Deadpool 2, was rife with development issues since day one of production, it was aimed overwhelmingly at fanboys obsessed with Star Wars deep lore answering questions that the general audience doesn’t give a shit about, nobody was even interested in the thing until the Lego Movie guys were signed on for a hot second, moviegoers aren’t currently hurting for cocky space cowboys...

...and because of the simple fact that it’s a solo movie about Han Solo...and it’s not 1995 and Harrison Ford isn’t in it. See, fanboys don’t realize that just because nerd and geek bullshit is mainstream now doesn’t mean that everyone is now a fanboy deep rooted in everything from where the characters are from to where they’re going, because when people say “I love Star Wars and Han Solo is my favorite character” what the vast majority of them mean is “Those movies with the space wizards and the laser swords are a lot of fun and Harrison Ford is a great movie star.” That’s it. That’s extent of why people like Han Solo. Sad dorks like us may care about stuff like where and when he got the Falcon, how he met Chewie, where the dice came from and all of that and more, but the general audience just wants to see Harrison Ford do cool shit in space. That’s it. To say nothing of the fact that nobody was even interested in the spinoffs in the first place. When Disney announced that they were making episodes 7,8, and 9 everyone went “Oh Hell yes, sign me up!” Then when they followed up with that they were also making spinoff movies about stuff that happened off screen or between movies the same audience was like “Oh...well that’s neat, I guess.”

And no, that stupid fanboy boycott had nothing to do with. Even the dude who started that petition to strike TLJ from canon admitted that he was in a bad place and that he was being stupid and angry, and I can promise you that all the shrieking dorks on Youtube are the buzzing of flies to Disney. If that crowd had any box office and movie making decision influence whatsoever, the next spinoff we’d see a trailer for would be “My Twi’lek Waifu: a Star Wars Story.”

PewDiePie is the worst thing to happen to video games this side of the gaming crash of 83 and he needs to fuck off

Yes, you read that right, and I don’t say that lightly. All sorts of terrible things have happened in the gaming industry since the gaming crash of 83. The console wars, the Atari Jaguar, the Philips CDi, Jack Thompson, the death of the Dreamcast, WoW, an entire console generation packed to the gills with homogenous gray and brown shooters with protagonists who all looked the fucking same, GamerGate, microtransactions, DLC abuse, the death of Maxis, an increasingly toxic fandom, “women are too hard to animate,” the degradation of E3 from a showcase of the biggest and bestest in gaming to a corporately sponsored circlejerk of self congratulatory backslapping and so much, much more.

I don’t care how much PewDiePie gives to charity, or how many fans he has, or how many people think he’s just the greatest, because he’s not. He’s an embarrassing, stupid asshole who constantly gets busted for making stupid racist jokes and by extension making his fans and everyone who has even the vaguest ties to the word ‘gamer’ look like stupid, racist assholes. He’s a corporate ass sucking apologist who gives exposure to anti Semites and racist wastes of space to his audience of mostly 10 to 15 year old boys, and he’s more terminally obnoxious than an Adderall addicted Pomeranian.

The day he posted his first video of him overreacting to a jump scare while making loud screeching noises on top of edgy rape jokes was the day the progress of “gaming as an art form” was shot between the eyes, placed in a box that was then filled with concrete, and thrown into the ocean. He’s a dumbass man child that’s making all of us look bad and he needs to take his millions worth of corporate sponsorships and fuck off forever into some dark, lonely corner of the Internet where he’ll never be seen or heard from again until an inevitable meltdown that lands him on an episode of Down the Rabbit Hole.

And that concludes this post. I’ll give my final thoughts tomorrow, and on Saturday I’m closing this account forever.

#unpopular opinion

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gheckoe · 6 years

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JAMES’S CURATED QUALITY FANFICTION PRIMER

for @rev0lutions-of-ruin, who tumblr does not like letting me tag

foolish bird avoids ao3 for years and misses out on the Good Shit, but it will be okay! she has THIS now. ft. DUMB LONG-WINDED CAPTAIN AMERICA MOVIE EXPLANATIONS, because i don’t think you would watch those movies willingly.

lots of selection - pick and choose, but if you don’t read “out of the dead land” i will be very sad. just treat this as really weird queer genre fiction and you’ll be alright. fics with pornographic content are marked as such, but said content is easy to skip as long as you can pick up on the warning signs.

we’re gonna start with the funny stuff.

nanananana BAT-DAD! (no ships, just bruce being a dad. safe for work and hilarious,)

who needs therapy when you have microsoft excel.

tim drake (robin 3) is a transgender teenage disaster. and bruce wayne is just generally a disaster. (same series.)

okay, now let’s get kind of sad. but not TOO sad.

nananananananana BATMAN (and superman)

this one made watching batman vs. superman worth it. not quite. but kind of. it’s fantastic.

i forget what happens in this one but i know i enjoyed it!

snk? why this, james. why this.

bad show, i know, but. formative experience. i figured out i was trans by projecting my feelings onto jean kirchstein. (not sure how, that’s just what happened.)

this one is stupidly fucking huge, in first person, and still isn’t finished.

included by virtue of some weird nostalgia. it’s half a million words long. try the first few chapters; i can’t guarantee anything that happens. don’t fucking judge me.

boring, punch me in the feelings already. more angst!

STEVEBUCKY

i don’t think you’ve watched the captain america movies, so i will explain them.

the saddest, gayest shit you will ever see. will fuck with your heart, ideally! but (as per always), skip the porn. this fandom is really big on it. UGH.

BUT it’s based off of movie adaptations of comic books, so the backstory is... ridiculous. i will summarize it for you. (tumblr ate this so here goes again)

THE DYNAMIC/history/massive goddamn ship manifesto

two guys, sitting in the great depression, two feet apart because it’s not socially acceptable to be gay

steve: tiny, blonde, always mad and big on SOCIAL JUSTICE. gets into fights for SOCIAL JUSTICE, despite growing up in the great depression when SOCIAL JUSTICE was not a commonly-known phrase or a common thing. he’s a bit of a shit, and he gets into shit. with his scrawny lil fists. he has all sorts of chronic illnesses but somehow manages to survive in a time with shitty medicine, and grow up to get into MORE shit. likes art, but is (partially?) colorblind

also he’s VERY HEAVILY coded as trans.

bucky: taller, brown hair, very popular but secretly a bit of a nerd (loves scifi, and is good at math). likes dancing, girls, and getting steve out of situations that he’s clearly over his head in and talking shit about it after. a bit of a charmer, etcetera.

there are some good fics from this era (”pre-war”) but idk where they are in my bookmarks. will update later.

so wait, what happens?

bucky gets steve out of dumb situations (like fighting a guy for talking during a movie) for pretty much all of their life. childhood friends until after high school-ish.

BUT, bucky is either drafted into the us army (it’s wwii now) or enlists, and steve is left alone in brooklyn, new york, to get into shit, without anyone to bail him out or prevent him from getting into MORE shit. so he finally manages to lie his scrawny, ill ass into the army, and (as one does) volunteers to get experimented on by the american government.

wait, what the fuck

comic books, okay. don’t @ me.

steve manages not to die! he finds a really pretty, badass lady to bisexually fawn over in the army (peggy carter is a fucking miracle), the experiments are a success and he ends up BIG and cured of all his ailments and with superfast metabolism (no alcohol) and superfast healing. he’s made it! (he basically just got really fast, unrealistic HRT hahaha)

... except the army can’t replicate the embiggening process they did with steve because the scientist that did it got killed, and steve is made into a glorified prettyman mascot to sell war bonds, instead of going to punch nazis, which he would be better at. he is a terrible mascot.

meanwhile, bucky has a shitty goddamn time in the european theatre. it’s terrible. he gets kidnapped by the EVIL SCIENCE NAZIS and put in a freaky camp and experimented on, poor guy.

you said you ship them, right? they’ve barely interacted so far, man. what the fuck.

alright alright i’m getting to it

steve the dancing monkey (in his words) is doing a Morale-Raising tour in europe for the troops and they hate it and he hates it. he discovers that... oh shit... bucky and his regiment (?) have been kidnapped by HYDRA! (the science nazis.)

naturally, he of little training MUST go save bucky, because the people that actually know how to save people know that it would be pointless to try. but steve “dumb shit” rogers will do it his own damn self. don’t @ him either. it’s the 1940s so he doesn’t have a phone.

steve will walk to austria, if he has to!... but he actually just gets a plane ride there, from peggy carter the badass and some other guy who’s not that relevant right now.

he KICKS NAZI ASS, SAVES THE PRISONERS, and MAKES MEANINGFUL EYE CONTACT WITH BUCKY ONCE HE FINDS HIM IN THE EVIL SCIENCE NAZI EXPERIMENTATION ROOM. bucky’s so out of it that he barely even tries to question why his old friend is suddenly hot TALL.

steve and the lads walk back from austria, and he is a Bona Fide War Hero and not just a mascot. he has the stylish grime and everything. on the way, he realizes that the lads are pretty cool, and assembles a Diverse Crack Squad of Guys That Really Wanna Kill Nazis from the cool guys he just met. upon return to wherever they were earlier, steve is made a REAL CAPTAIN now, and his Diverse Crack Squad is at liberty to... go kill nazis.

bucky tags along. he is very handsome and talented at math, so he is a SNIPER and saves steve’s dumb ass (from getting shot by nazis, instead of getting punched in the face) like he used to. the Diverse Crack Squad gears up to take down THE WORST OF THE SCIENCE NAZIS, on a train in the mountains! they can change the course of COMIC BOOK WWII!

you said it was tragic. show me the tragic.

the TRAIN INFILTRATION does not go as planned, and bucky is knocked from the train and falls to his cold, painful, (presumably) death. steve can’t watch.

they catch a REALLY BAD SCIENCE NAZI, but it is a very hollow victory. steve goes and tries to get drunk in a blown-up bar where he hung out with bucky and they were really queer together.

the OTHER really bad science nazi now has a plan to BLOW UP COMIC BOOK NEW YORK! steven will NOT allow this to happen.

he’s also kind of given up on life. he has a flair for the dramatic, and also the ambiguously suicidal.

not that being ambiguously suicidal adds to the Dramatic Romance of this. it doesn’t, and that would be creepy. the point is that steve rogers has a LOT of issues, including the ones that science can’t cure.

this SPECIFIC PLANE is headed towards new york, full of explosives. steve manages to get aboard the plane... and doesn’t even try to escape. he crashes it into the water in the atlantic ocean, saying goodbye to peggy on the radio as it hits. he is also presumed dead. it’s... basically a suicide attempt.

flash forward seventy-some years.

wait, wasn’t he in the avengers?

steve rogers is found inside the frozen plane encased in ice in the ocean. he’s revived (super healing, woop) and... doesn’t say anything, because he’s really not up to expressing feelings.

he has a TERRIBLE time. all of his friends are dead or old and went about their lives without him, and he’s alone in a confusing new world. (but the food is better, vaccines are good, and no polio.) he’s not fantastic at making new friends, because, as shown by him and bucky’s entire relationship, he’s a bit of a sad introvert and just picks one person and... holds on.

blah blah avengers one blah blah, new team and fighting BAD THINGS. but steve is too angsty to make friends. he joins the new security organization that peggy founded, SHIELD, without really inspecting it that well because... he didn’t plan to be alive past flying the plane into the ice, much less in the 21st century. he doesn’t know what he’d do otherwise.

idk that sounds a little slow

he has DEPRESSION. it is a little slow. but it’ll pick up! (not emotionally.) now it’s very anti-establishment action flick. enter CAPTAIN AMERICA (2): THE WINTER SOLDIER.

steve makes a friend. actually, two! sam and natasha are wonderful, and they have some things in common. but steve obtains friendship while realizing that SHIELD is corrupt to the core and actually infiltrated by HYDRA, so he and his new friends have to... burn it to the ground. he “died” (or tried to) to stop HYDRA, and it’s still here and worse then ever. things feel pointless.

to make it worse, he’s fighting this creepily effective impersonal masked assassin on a bridge and oh fuck, oh fuck it’s bucky and didn’t he die years and years ago and his arm is METAL what happened to him, and he’s pretending not to recognize steve.

HYDRA is planning to eliminate sources of resistance for their new world order via shooting them from the air, so steve has to take one specific FLYING DEATHMACHINE down. he does, and brainwashed HYDRA bucky, the winter soldier, is there to stop him.

steve makes an appeal to emotions. “bucky stop you can’t do this”

bucky is confused, but he’s been programmed to do this.

steve tells his coworkers to JUST SHOOT THE DEATHMACHINE DOWN ALREADY, because he’s... given up again. he’s very talented at equating heroism with self-sacrifice/suicide. but he disables the DEATH part of the DEATHMACHINE without it getting shot down.

bucky has been trapped underneath a beam, but steve’s with bucky till the end of the line, even if bucky is brainwashed and lacking memories. steve drops his shield in the water and falls.

it’s another attempt to die. stop that, steve. go to therapy.

bucky doesn’t remember who he is, but he jumps after him. steve is very injured from his fight with bucky, and wouldn’t have survived the fall, but bucky drags him to shore and... leaves.

steve wakes up in the hospital with his new friend sam. they’re going to track bucky down, even if it takes forever.

ISN’T THAT FUCKED UP? isn’t that sad? it’s terrible. now, fics. most of them are after ca:tws, because that’s when the ship got popular. a lot of them center around Finding Bucky and Getting To Know Him Again.

there’s a lot of sappy sad let’s-teach-bucky-how-to-be-a-person-again-and-get-steve-to-be-less-sad but i like the ones that are like sad action movies, or sad queer movies, and less like sad romance movies. my bookmarks are a mess, so here’s the best stuff i could dredge up.

out of the dead land: this one kills me every single time. there’s something terribly cinematic about it. but, as fandom is wont to do, there’s porn near the end. skip that part. ew. it’s an introspective scifi action epic, with just enough identity issues to make you want to cry! READ IT, IT’S IMPORTANT.

this: alternate universe, sans steve “dying.” epistolary. sad, as far as i can remember. (i’d rec the rest of this series but i think it’s best if you read this one first?)

courtroom/media fic. what if the winter soldier got arrested after the movie? (cap fandom does this kind of fake-media thing very well. i just reread it. it’s still good.)

this one isn’t exactly groundbreaking, but it’s a different take on the fandom’s typical post-winter soldier bucky interpretation. quite short, 100% safe for work.

in this one, steve successfully gets drunk, makes some friends, and gains some coping skills. good for dark humour. there’s porn somewhere but i’m sure it’s easily skippable, otherwise i wouldn’t have bookmarked it. not 100% the best thing every but it’s pretty fun.

if you aren’t team s/b all the way then we can’t be friends, but here’s some other marvel stuff i guess

lesbians, ballet, feelings? it’s a rarepair but it’s pretty lovely. au, no background knowledge required. basically a beautiful indie film that’s kind of oscar-bait. you will like this one, i think. there’s probably porn somewhere.

trans black widow. (that chapter only, not sure what the rest is). not very well-written and i have terrible memory but i’m 75% sure it made me cry.

ENJOY! or try to. don’t feel obligated to. but please at least TRY out of the dead land, it is groundbreaking.

#teya #personap #fandom

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wbwest · 7 years

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New Post has been published on WilliamBruceWest.com

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West Week Ever: Pop Culture In Review - 7/7/17

I took last week off, but I hope y’all had a great 4th of July weekend. Life’s still kinda kicking my ass, so this’ll be an abridged edition this week.

I finally got around to watching a movie! It’s been on my list since I first heard it was in pre-production, and I’m amazed it took me this long to watch it, considering my love for the source material. The Founder stars Michael Keaton as Ray Kroc, the “founder” of McDonald’s who really just stole the concept from the McDonald Brothers. A down-on-his-luck shake machine salesman, Kroc happens upon the fledgling McDonald’s restaurant in Southern California. Knowing a good thing when he saw it, he pretty much insisted on becoming a part of the operation, mainly focused on franchising the business. And that’s when things get interesting. I LOVE McDonald’s. You can hate me all you want, but like Jim Gaffigan says, “Everyone has their own McDonald’s”. Mine just happens to be the actual company. I don’t know enough about the history of the company to know how factual an account the movie was, but it was sure damn entertaining. Keaton is amazing in it, and I feel like anyone would enjoy the movie even if they think they don’t give a rat’s ass about McDonald’s as a company. I highly recommend this film.

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We finally got our first trailer for Marvel’s Inhumans, and now I realize why they were so hesitant to release it. MY GOD THIS LOOKS TERRIBLE! It looks like Into The Badlands – a show that I hate because people fawn over it when it looks like something that would’ve aired after Xena on Saturday afternoons 20 year ago. Yeah, I even told one of the Badlands creators that when he confronted me over my “appraisal” on Twitter. Badlands is a bad show, but it gets “diversity points”, so folks give it a pass. This show doesn’t even get diversity right, so it’s really just a shitshow in the making. I hate hate HATE that this is considered an official part of the MCU, even if it’s just a part of the never-referenced TV wing. Anyway, this trainwreck debuts in IMAX on September 1st, but will officially air on ABC beginning September 22nd.

Speaking of diversity points, CBS lost all of theirs when they let the Asians go from Hawaii Five-O last weekend. Daniel Dae Kim and Grace Park both left the show after salary negotiations broke down as they requested pay equal to their costars. I’ve never seen more than 15 minutes of that show, but I know the dude from Lost seemed pretty important to things. He was basically the White guys’ interpreter to all things native. CBS has claimed that they offered them sizable increases, which weren’t deemed acceptable to Park and Kim. Now the Five-O showrunner, Peter Lenkov, is now joining the side of the network, saying that CBS made “generous offers” to the stars, yet they decided not to renew their contracts.

This has turned into a discussion of race in Hollywood and how things still aren’t equal across the board. I’m a big fan of billing. Billing is important, and should go to the most well-known star. It’s the reason all the ’89 Batman posters say “Jack Nicholson” first. Dude was a bigger star. Now, I didn’t watch Lost and I didn’t watch Battlestar Galactica, but I still recognize Kim and Park from those shows. Maybe it’s just because I’m a geek and folks were always talking about those shows. The show’s star, Alex O’Loughlin? I can’t name a thing he’s been in. Don’t know that dude from Adam. And the other lead? James Caan’s kid? Whatever. Y’all mean you couldn’t pony up the cash to keep Lost Dude and Battlestar Girl? We’re not talking about big names here so, unless there was a favored nations clause where O’Loughlin would have to get a raise if they got raises, thereby thwarting the whole “equality” thing, I don’t see what the problem was. As has been pointed out, all O’Loughlin and Caan had to do was stand in solidarity with their costars and this would’ve been a non-issue. Word on the street it O’Loughlin is quitting at the end of the season anyway, so it’s not like we’re talking another 5 years here. He couldn’t keep his ego in check for a season? Nah, for too many folks, as long as they’ve got theirs, they don’t care if you’ve got yours.

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We also got a trailer for Pitch Perfect 3, forcing me to reiterate that NOT EVERYTHING NEEDS TO BE A TRILOGY. I know everyone involved likes money, but sometimes there are natural, built-in ends to things. That thing was a 2-movie franchise and that’s it. Don’t forget – I lived that life. I was in the same competition the Bellas won in the first film (we came in 2nd), and I experienced the aca-graduation blues that the girls experienced in the second film. That’s pretty much it. There’s nowhere else to go. I mean, sure there are some random outlier outcomes. One of my groupmates is a hit producer in Asia now. Another is a pretty big pop star in Hong Kong. The rest of us? Dead-end jobs and bills. I used to occasionally do karaoke, but even that got to be too depressing. That shit is fun while it lasts, and then you’ve got to move on. So, in that vein, I can understand the plot of the 3rd movie, with the girls wanting to have one last hurrah, but I don’t really understand the concept of putting them on a USO tour. Is that something the troops wanna see? Has Pentatonix been dropped into the theater of war? It just seems kinda farfetched to me, and I was fine with how things were left in the last movie. Sure, I’ll see it, but it won’t be in a theater.

Things You Might Have Missed This Week

Hide grandma’s wallet – QVC is buying out Home Shopping Network.

After 3 seasons, The Carmichael Show has been canceled by NBC. I really wish someone else would snatch it up, as it’s a smart show

Netflix has renewed Dear, White People for a 2nd season. Meanwhile, they canceled Girlboss after one season. Reed Hastings giveth and he taketh away.

Speaking of Netflix, hearing the cries of fans, Sense8 will officially conclude with a 2-hour finale special

Netflix also renewed one of my favorite original shows, F is For Family, for a 3rd season.

Apparently a series based on the popular Step Up film series, called Step Up: High Water, will premiere on YouTube Red, where absolutely NOBODY is gonna watch it.

Fuller House season 3 will coincidentally premiere on the 30th anniversary of Full House, September 22nd.

Make your vacations weird again, as Cirque du Soleil has purchased Blue Man Group.

Patton Oswalt is engaged to 80s actress Meredith Salenger. Ya know, the same Patton whose wife died last year. I guess we all grieve in our own ways…

Lack of interest brought down The House, which bombed at the box office last weekend. It was reportedly Will Ferrell’s lowest live-action opening for a major studio.

Nick Fury will reportedly be making his MCU return in 2019’s Captain Marvel

HBO is reportedly getting the True Detective band back together, with a 3rd season to star Mahershala Ali

Nixing speculation that she was still up for the White House Press Secretary job, Kimberly Guilfoyle has reupped her contract with Fox News

Rob Lowe and his sons will chase the supernatural in The Lowe Files, and I literally cannot wait.

New game show, Snap Decision, premieres August 7th. Hosted by David Allen Grier, the show breaks precedent because it will debut on GSN and in syndication on the same date.

The world’s leading (and only) bar scientist favorited my tweet this week

We’re gonna do something different here this week. Usually, if you’ve been paying attention to the week’s news, you can at least try to figure out who or what had the best week. Some weeks it’s harder to choose something than others. Then I remembered, “Will, this is YOUR site.” After all, this is all pop culture through my lens, so it’s my rules. So, sometimes I might choose something that meant a lot to me that week, while you were none the wiser. But I bring it up on the site so that we’re all on the same page. And that’s the kind of pick I have this week.

After watching The Founder, I was left thinking, “Michael Keaton is a goddamn national treasure”. After watching Spider-Man: Homecoming last night (yeah, we’ll talk about it next week, when more of y’all have had a chance to see it), I was thinking “Why have we been sleeping on Keaton the past 20 years?” I mean, with the exception of The Other Guys, I honestly hadn’t seen a Michael Keaton movie since probably Batman Returns, and yet Birdman is the one considered his “comeback vehicle”. In The Founder, he really made you feel for a traveling salesman who was at the end of his rope. After a string of laughable failures, he finally found something to which he could hitch his wagon: McDonald’s. And while he also had to prove this to everyone in his sphere of orbit, most importantly he had to prove this to himself. He really needed a win, and Keaton did such a great job conveying that.

In Homecoming, Keaton plays Adrian Toomes, better known as the Vulture (though he’s never called that by name in the film). Not unlike Alfred Molina’s Dr. Octopus, he’s something of a sympathetic villain. Were it not for the fact that comic book franchises deal in the good/bad binary, you could almost relate to him and understand where he’s coming from. He’s a modern-day working class guy who feels ignored by the fat cats up on high. He doesn’t have evil goals. He simply wants to provide for his family, and he has a code of honor that dictates he must do whatever it takes to make good on that promise. I felt that Keaton did a great job expressing the plight of the working man. Sure, he got to utter some cheesy villain dialogue, but that simply comes with the territory. If you stopped for a minute, and ignored the fact that Spider-Man HAS to win, you realize that Toomes is actually kind of on to something. Again, though, I’ll get into more Homecoming thoughts next week.

My pal Chad pretty much swears by Michael Keaton as his favorite actor – a lot of that having to do with his immense love of 1989’s Batman. I’ve gotta say, I was never a huge fan of Keaton’s Batman, and when Chad would laud Keaton’s praises, I wasn’t really seeing it. I see it now, though. I have seen the light and I am healed! Dear Hollywood, more Michael Keaton, please! He pretty much impressed me on two different cinematic fronts this week, and that’s why Michael Keaton had the West Week Ever.

#80s #A Cappella #Batman #Comics #Marvel #Movies #Politics #Race #Social Media #Syndication #Television #West Week Ever

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formidolumina · 7 years

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Interview: Actor Mark Strong on Playing Sinestro in 'Green Lantern' Source: X

I've had the honor of interviewing actor Mark Strong a few times over the last few years, while following his career explode with riveting roles as villains in numerous big movies like RocknRolla, Sherlock Holmes, Kick-Ass and Robin Hood. While some comic book fans may say Sinestro is also a villain, in Warner Bros' Green Lantern movie hitting theaters this week, Strong plays a good Sinestro, before his yellow destiny. I met up with Mark at Comic-Con last year for an interview on this very topic, and followed up with him again a few weeks ago after finally seeing Green Lantern to talk about the challenges of playing the alien Sinestro.

Thaal Sinestro was born on the planet Korugar in space sector 1417 and is dedicated to preserving order, making him one of the greatest Green Lanterns in their history. As always, Mark does a fantastic job in the role, bringing some gravitas to the character. I can't wait to see where Sinestro will go beyond this, as fans definitely know that he has an interesting future ahead of him and hopefully we'll get to see Mark bringing that future to life down the road. For now though, here's my latest interview with Mark on Green Lantern.

You've mentioned how important technology was to making Green Lantern, can you expand upon that and how technology was so important for your character and creating this movie?

Mark Strong: Well, the technology has definitely caught up with the vision, so you can make a film like Green Lantern. But what's been fascinating me over the last few days of talking about it is what I've realized is that Superman and Batman are the well-known DC Superheroes. Green Lantern was always considered a second tier one or "the other one". And I realized the reason for that is because you haven't been able to film Green Lantern before now. Superman's problems - apart from the fact he goes to Krypton and back, and Batman's problems are essentially earthboun-- it all takes place on Earth. So once you've got them in the costume, in the cape and the tights, everything happens on Earth. But Green Lantern, you can't tell that story without going to Oa. So it's not that he's a lesser one, it's just that the technology hasn't been able to kind of deliver him until now. I'm sure that's the reason.

But actually, when you think about it the whole, guy finds an alien, inherits a ring, realizes there are other people within the universe, then goes to Oa, then realizes there's a cosmic police force, it's mind blowing. It's way more interesting and cool than Batman or Superman's problem, which are essentially fairly simple.

Speaking of technology, it seemed like you didn't have much control in this role. As an actor, it's important that to fully embody a character, but in this you are wearing grey spandex, heavy make-up, prosthetics, and all you really have control over is your face and head. Is that restricting for you as an actor? And how do you approach that in terms of still giving the performance you want to give?

Mark: It's something you have to get used to. I mean the prosthetic… Funny enough, even though, as you say, the body is CGI, but they are my movements. So I wear a suit that tracks my movements. My movements have been copied, so it is my body. My head, bizarrely, I'm under a prosthetic with contact lenses, so I feel it's very hard to make the usual facial expressions that you would in order to communicate. I had to learn a slightly different way of allowing Sinestro to communicate, by tilting the head, catching the light in a particular way, turning in a particular way to tell the story, because I couldn't rely on furrowing my brow, for example.

But I quite enjoyed the challenge, once I got used to the idea that none of it was there. Essentially, it's not dissimilar from theater because you have to use your imagination. You have to fill in the blanks. And the same is true of theater. You walk out on stage, you know it's not real. You can see the audience. You can see the lights. And you walk off stage and the stage management person is standing there with headphones and a clipboard, even though you're pretending you're in Chekhov's Russia or something.

So you know it's not real, but that's not the point. The point is how you help the audience suspend their disbelief and transport them somewhere else. So I don't have a problem with the fact that I wasn't in complete control like you are in a normal film.

Did you feel that using so much technology to build this world would help in telling the bigger story, specifically with your character and his progression?

Mark: Yeah, because I don't know how you would shoot it convincingly to allow people to believe that there was this place and that these people existed within this place. So I have no problem with… The truth is, it's born out of a truth. The costumes, and they haven't just made them CGI because of a gimmick. The costume designer wanted to suggest that each of these different Lantern's uniforms was their skin, and that the ring created their uniform on their skin.

So if you look closely, Tomar-Re is a slightly scaly version. And if you look at Kilowog's, it's slightly different from Sinestro's, from the humanoid ones. So you need CGI in order to tell that story. I mean one character, one Green Lantern, is Bzzt, he's a fly. How's he going to get spandex on? He couldn't put on a spandex suit! There's one Green Lantern that's just an eyeball. So I love the idea that it's born of a truth, which is that you could believe that the suit is organic. It comes from the ring and from within them. And you can only tell that, I think, with CGI.

While on set, did they ever show you what the world you were in would look like? And second part of this, did you have the chance to look at your performance in relation to the world, with other elements rendered, almost with some pre-vis?

Mark: To answer the second bit first, no, there was no technique to show you, not even on the monitor. Even if you went to the monitor you were still looking at yourself in the funny gray suit with dots against the blue wall. They couldn't phase in, or never did phase in the background.

But what we did have on set was the artwork so you could go and remind yourself where you were. For example, when Sinestro speaks to all the lanterns, I would go and look at where I was and where they were. And, in fact, that had a 3D model on the side of the set, so I could go and see exactly where I was. But in the end I'm still standing on a green box looking at nobody. And part of the challenge of that is what makes it fun.

How much interaction did DC Comics have, specifically Geoff Johns. Did you know him and work with him on set? How much did DC come in to shape the characters, especially with Sinestro because of his mythology and where he goes?

Mark: Geoff's input, and I got to know him really well over the course of making this, his input all happened before I arrived. I think his input was with the writers, with the producers, and with kind of guiding them in the right direction with the mythology. Once we got on set it was Martin's world. Martin was in charge.

My favorite moment was when I came for a test, because we also had to work out… Once Sinestro had the prosthetic, had the color, we had to work out how to light it, because different kinds of light would make the color fade or would make it look too purple. So we had to do screen tests where the light would be changing and we had to see what would be the the best way. And Geoff was at one of those. And I loved the moment when I was able to just go up to him and go, "What do you think?" and see him go, "Oh my God! That is exactly how I imagined him."

And then Geoff, I would ask him about the history and who Sinestro was, why he was the way he was, all of that. He was always around to talk to. But his input was probably more when the thing was being put together in pre-production.

Finally, I want to ask again about how you play so many different, unique characters, as that's what I really love about you as an actor. How do you choose your projects and differentiate your roles, and how do your career choices work in relation to your family?

Mark: Well, I love the idea of transformation. I come from the theater where you are allowed to experiment way more than you are on film. You can play old guys, young guys, you can play people from all over the world in theater, and you have weeks and weeks and weeks to rehearse that and get it right. So I've always been fascinated by playing something that's other than me. I wouldn't really know how to play myself, I don't think. I wouldn't trust that that was the right way to play it.

And that's why… the head of the Jordanian Secret Service [from Body of Lies], great. That's removed from me. Archy [from RocknRolla], a gangster, it's removed from me. I get to wear a wig. It transports with me to somewhere else. And the same is true with Sinestro. What I loved about him was the potential for transformation. And as an actor, that is the thing that I love most of all. Probably why I'm a character actor. As far as my family is concerned, they love everything I do. My boys are absolutely wild about Sinestro. And, of course, the irony is in my house the bad guy is the good guy.

A big thank you to Mark Strong and Warner Bros. It's an honor to speak with Mark every time and I'm always excited to see what he will do next. Green Lantern is playing in theaters now!

#sinestro #thaal sinestro #green lantern #green lantern corps #green lantern movie #mark strong

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aion-rsa · 4 years

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Best DC Comics to Binge Read on DC Universe

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With an enormous swath of the world involved in varying degrees of social distancing, many of us suddenly find ourselves with a lot of time on our hands. Never fear! There are more options for streaming comics than ever before, and that means we have access to more of comics history, more hidden gems and epochal runs than ever before. But the variety of options to read can be daunting. That’s why we’ve put together a recommendation list of some of our favorite comics binge reads to help you through quarantine.

DC Universe rolled out in 2017 as the first full-service entertainment streaming platform – old shows, old movies, new shows, new movies, and a huge library of comics. And while a lot of the excitement over the platform has been about that original or new shows (justifiably! Harley Quinn and Doom Patrol are amazing!), it also gave us access to a staggering catalog of old comic books.

If you’re coming to a comic streaming service like DC Universe, chances are you don’t need us to recommend the hits. Nobody who watches the CW shows needs to be told that Crisis on Infinite Earths is worth reading. Likewise Batman: Year One, or All-Star Superman or The Great Darkness Saga. We’re going to skip over some of the obvious ones and point you towards hidden gems, stories you might have otherwise skipped over but for a trusted recommendation. We are also looking for monster runs that will keep you occupied – you can read six issues in one sitting. Some of these might take you an entire round of social distancing to finish.

A quick note about the reading guides: Many of them may have their own separate entry under DC Universe’s reading lists – those are helpful, but these are definitive. We will occasionally link to non-Den sources, but if you like what you hear, you should be encouraged to find your own best path. A lot of these stories wend through crossovers that are of varying degrees of relevance to the main books. It’s your call if you want to read the whole thing.

The Death and Return of Superman

The Death of Superman Reading Order

I know I said we wouldn’t talk about obvious must reads, but I feel like The Death of Superman (and it’s aftermath, World Without a Superman, Reign of the Supermen, and Kal-El’s inevitable return) should be on here. They can’t really be recommended enough.

“The ‘90s” are often maligned as a wave of gimmicks and stunts, and killing the most important comic character in the history of superhero books definitely qualifies as a stunt. But what made The Death of Superman stand out (and several other ‘90s DC events, to be honest) is that it was actually very good. This era of Superman comics is actually a hidden gem – Clark is a joy, and all the weirdness and fun of the Superman universe is in full swing, like Cadmus, Mxyzptlk, and a truly bizarre (but surprisingly good) Justice League roster.

Movies

Men of Steel: 11 Actors Who Have Played Superman

By Mike Cecchini

How Brandon Routh Returned as Superman for Crisis on Infinite Earths

By Mike Cecchini

The four writers – Jerry Ordway, Louise Simonson, Roger Stern, and Dan Jurgens – move pretty seamlessly between them on the main Superman books, and the art teams (Jon Bogdanove, Jurgens, Butch Guice, and Tom Grummett especially in the Death story) do amazing jobs of telling the story. Don’t be fooled by how gimmicky this feels, The Death and Return of Superman actually lives up to the hype.

Batman & Robin

Batman & Robin #1-17, Annual #1, Batman #17, Batman & Robin #18-32, Robin Rises: Omega, Batman & Robin #33-37, Robin Rises: Alpha #1, Batman & Robin #38-40, Annual #3

The Pete Tomasi/Patrick Gleason run on Batman and Robin never got the love it should have, because it ran parallel to two of the most high-profile Bat-comics of all time in Scott Snyder and Greg Capullo’s Batman, and the back half of Grant Morrison’s story in Batman Incorporated. But in ten years, people are going to be looking back at this as a classic.

Comics

True Detective Creator Outlines What His Version of Batman Would Be Like

By John Saavedra

Movies

The Batman: Release Date, Cast, Villains, and More Details About the DCEU Movie

By Rosie Fletcher and 2 others

This is a controversial claim, but if you read this run, I think it holds up: Pete Tomasi writes the best Damian Wayne. He’s the right mix of arrogant little shit and not-actually-as-competent-as-Batman, and he actually learns lessons in this run that feel earned. He also dies during these stories, and Tomasi gets the chance to explore Bruce’s way of grieving, as well as drop in a series of guest stars that includes the best Two Face story I’ve ever read. Gleason and inker Mick Gray are utterly incredible, and do as much with one sixth-page panels with heavy inks and silhouettes as many art teams do with full page splashes. It’s a great, underrated run that I think you’ll love.

Wonder Woman

Wonder Woman (2006) #14-44, one story in #600

Oh my goodness Gail Simone’s Wonder Woman is exactly, precisely what I want out of a Wonder Woman comic. To me, Diana’s comics are an exception in that they should be as focused on how to avoid fighting as they are on the action. This run does that perfectly: she isn’t a belligerent meathead looking to stab everything in sight (but she does spend a little time with a neat Conan analogue, while we’re on the subject). She’s truly an agent of peace who then periodically has to kick some ass.

Movies

Wonder Woman Wasn’t Always Set During World War I

By Kayti Burt

Movies

Wonder Woman 1984: Who Is Maxwell Lord?

By Jim Dandy

The art is really good – Aaron Lopresti and Bernard Chang handle the bulk of it, and the storytelling and pacing are really well handled, but the panel borders stand out as especially interesting and visually entertaining. The guest stars are great – Black Canary brings Diana to Roulette’s fight club for a couple of issues, and there’s a big Power Girl punchup later in the run. This is just excellent, excellent Wonder Woman storytelling.

Suicide Squad

Suicide Squad on Comic Book Herald (end at issue #66)

John Ostrander, Kim Yale, and (mostly) Luke McDonough’s original Suicide Squad is a revelation. The concept is almost overdone at this point, and is a little bit ruined by putting big names like Harley Quinn on the team, but taking a batch of nobody villains and putting them on suicide missions to earn their freedom actually sets serious stakes, and this book does everything it should with those stakes. This is politics and espionage and force projection all wrapped into a story that makes the DC Universe feel more complete.

Movies

Suicide Squad 2 Cast, Release Date, News, Story, and More Details

By Mike Cecchini

Movies

The Many Deaths of The Suicide Squad

By Marc Buxton

Beyond the plotting, though, there are so many great characters that come out of these books. Amanda Waller is one of the single best characters in all of DC Comics, and this is the run that made her the badass who can face down Batman in the shower without flinching. Punch and Jewlee are hilarious running gags. Deadshot gets some incredible work. Hell, even Captain Boomerang gets multiple dimensions added to him (without ever losing his core concept: he’s a giant asshole). I promise you, I’m underselling how good this era of Suicide Squad is.

Legion of Super-Heroes

Legion of Super-Heroes Secret Files & Origins #2; Legion of Super-Heroes (1989) #122-125 alternating issues with Legionnaires (1993) #79-81; Legion Lost (2000) #1-12; Legion Worlds (2001) #1-5, The Legion (2001) #1-26, Legion Secret Files & Origins 3003; The Legion #27-33

If you loved Dan Abnett and Andy Lanning’s Marvel space work, when you read their Legion of Super-Heroes, you’ll be baffled at how Guardians of the Galaxy ended up on the big screen and not this.

The Legion of Super-Heroes is generally regarded as…not the most newbie-friendly superhero team in the world. Fair or not, this run of Legion comics is incredibly accessible and does as good a job integrating them into the larger DC Universe as any I’ve read. It’s also exactly like DnA’s Marvel cosmic work, in that it is wonderful space opera that happens to have superheroes. The first batch of stories deals with a wave of catastrophes hitting the galaxy in quick succession. Legion Lost has a group of Legionnaires get thrown outside of the galaxy as they’re trying to fix one of the first catastrophes. Legion Worlds serves as a series of check-ins with popular Legionnaires left behind in the United Planets and is a really effective way to hook you into the 31st century of the DC Universe.

And finally, The Legion is an outstanding team book following all of those. Legion Lost is an unquestionable highlight; Olivier Coipel’s art is incredible, and the story will make you launch your tablet/phone/computer across the room at a couple of twists. This run is incredible comics.

Justice League International

…you don’t have to read all of this, but if you feel like going for it, do it. You can stop at the red dots, though.

The Bwa-Ha-Ha era is half-superhero comic, half-workplace comedy, the template for greatness to come in Legends of Tomorrow, but a great superhero work in its own right. It’s an era of Justice League that takes itself (and its villains, and its stakes) much less seriously than just about any other era of the last 40 years. If you were raised on the post-Morrison “New Olympus” era of the League, the tone shift might be a little jarring. But that tone shift is part of what makes Keith Giffen, J. M DeMatteis, and Kevin Maguire’s run on Justice League special.

There are so many really good characters in this book, but one of the best parts is how much it does for both the League staples like Martian Manhunter and Batman, alongside the…less substantial…characters. Blue and Gold (Beetle and Booster, respectively) got their start here, and that one panel where Batman knocks out Guy Gardner that gets shared around the internet once a year is from this era.

Comics

Justice League Keeps Building the Wider DC Universe

By Mike Cecchini

Comics

New DC Universe Timeline Revealed

By Mike Cecchini

And besides being great comics, this run is also the favorite Justice League of a disproportionate amount of current comics writers, giving it an outsized influence on not just current books, but the rest of pop culture that superheroes have taken over – Wonder Woman 1984 is probably going to owe a HUGE debt to the Max Lord created by Giffen, DeMatteis, and Maguire.

Deathstroke

Deathstroke: Rebirth #1; Deathstroke (2016) #1-18; Titans (2016) #11; Teen Titans (2016) #8, Deathstroke #19-20, Teen Titans Annual #1, Deathstroke #21-42 (and when they go up, read The Lazarus Contract crossover and through issue #50 of the main series)

Priest’s Deathstroke is the best book that came out of DC Rebirth. Under normal circumstances, Slade Wilson sucks. He too often falls into a murder daddy archetype, a super cool anti-hero who goes big on the violence and the dysfunction as background statuses, and not as relevant parts of his story. Priest turned all that on its head and turned in a 50 issue run (plus a couple of specials, annuals and crossovers) that was about a father who loved his kids and didn’t know how to tell them, who also happened to be a top shelf mercenary and supervillain.

Movies

Deathstroke Solo Movie Details Revealed by Gareth Evans

By Kirsten Howard

Deathstroke: The Most Versatile Villain in the DC Universe

By Marc Buxton

That’s not to say there isn’t some super cool ass-whipping in it. Batman and Damian Wayne are recurring characters, as Priest sets up a mystery that might undo Damian as a character and gives more depth to Deathstroke’s issues with the Teen Titans. There’s an entire arc dedicated to him fighting various aspects of his own personality, personified in other villains from the rest of the DCU.

And it’s all so clearly and aggressively Priest – it has all the same style as his iconic Black Panther run, but with different storytelling to fit Slade’s tale. This is one of my favorite comics from recent years.

Starman

Starman Reading Order on ComicsBackIssues

For about three quarters of my entire life, DC had an absolute stranglehold on legacy in superhero comics. The entire DC Universe was littered with stories about someone new picking up an old cowl and an old title and having to grow into that role, whether it’s Jason Todd as Robin, Wally West as Flash, Dick Grayson as Batman, Kyle Rayner, Connor Hawke, Tim Drake, Stephanie Brown. The list is nearly endless. The thing is, it’s a really good story archetype and an excellent use of shared universe superhero trappings to give heft and depth to stories that are otherwise not really allowed growth.

DC’s Stargirl Reveals Justice Society of America and Villains

By Mike Cecchini

Comics

Inside the Return of the Justice Society of America to the DC Universe

By Mike Cecchini

No comics did it better than James Robinson and Tony Harris’ Starman. It tells us the story of Jack Knight, the extremely Gen X son of golden age Starman Ted Knight. Ted is retired and passed his cosmic rod onto his son David, who gets murdered at the end of the first issue. It’s a hit on Ted’s whole family by one of his old villains, and Jack has to take up the rod to survive. Then he gets thrown into the mythology of the DC universe explained through the Starman legacy. It’s beautiful, fun, sad, meaningful, and heartfelt, and I bet you $1 that you cry at least once.

The Question

The Question (1986) #1-15, Detective Comics Annual 1988 , Green Arrow Annual 1988 , The Question Annual #1, The Question #16-24, Annual #2, #25-36

Comics

The Question Bounces Through Time In New DC Series

By Jim Dandy

Everyone jokes about how much of scenic Gotham City is abandoned amusement parks and chemical plants, but Gotham City is a family-friendly resort compared to the Hub City of Dennis O’Neill and Denys Cowan’s The Question. “Atmospheric” doesn’t even begin to describe this run.

It takes The Question, a character created by Steve Ditko, co-opted and pastiched as Rorschach by Alan More and Dave Gibbons in Watchmen, and introduced him to the DC Universe proper by putting Vic Sage through a spiritual ringer. Everything about this book is incredible – Vic is a terrific character; his supporting cast is thoroughly real; the book ties into the greater DC Universe really well (via Richard Dragon, Lady Shiva, and the annual crossover in the middle with Batman and Green Arrow).

But the real star here is Hub City, a love letter that’s also hate mail to mid-80s urban blight as scenery. And Cowan and inker Malcolm Jones III’s art – it’s tremendous.

Orion

Orion (2000) #1-25

I’ve been a fan of Walt Simonson’s Thor since I first read it, because it’s obviously incredible. But I didn’t realize until Thor: Ragnarok and DC Universe came out that Simonson might be the best comic creator to follow up on Jack Kirby’s ideas of all time, and it was Orion that really did it for me.

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Simonson puts Orion, son of Darkseid raised on New Genesis by Highfather as part of the peace treaty between the two factions of New Gods, on his prophesied track to kill Darkseid, and finishes it pretty early on. The fifth issue is just Simonson drawing a huge blowout fight between the two, and it’s predictably gorgeous. But he sticks with the story past that battle and digs deep into Orion’s character, the mythology of the New Gods, and some of Kirby’s best creations (the Newsboy Legion has a running subplot and it’s awesome). It also has backups from some of the biggest superstars in comics (Frank Miller and Dave Gibbons, among others). This is a hefty run of comics, but you won’t be able to put it down.

The post Best DC Comics to Binge Read on DC Universe appeared first on Den of Geek.

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ciathyzareposts · 5 years

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Missed Classic 69: Borrowed Time (1985) – Introduction

Written by Joe Pranevich

If you are like me, sometimes research takes you places that you don’t expect. When I started into Batman Returns, I expected to find that it was a half-assed game produced by a no-name little software outlet who won the minimum bid to make the ninth licensed game based on the 1992 movie. And, it might still be that. I haven’t even looked at the game yet as I wait for a copy of the manual to arrive by mail. (I’ll be donating it to the Internet Archive once I wrap up my review.) Instead, I discovered the story of Subway Software and one of it founders, Bill Kunkel.

Rather than jump straight into Batman, I’d like to tell Mr. Kunkel’s story through a different game: an illustrated text adventure called Borrowed Time, Subway Software’s first release. As so many of these games were, it was a multi-party affair: developed by Interplay using their adventure game engine, based on a story and design by Kunkel’s company, and published by Activision. This was still around four months before Activision bought Infocom so it is not quite a cousin to the games that we have looked at in the Zork marathon, but it is a sign that they were interested in the interactive fiction genre. Borrowed Time has kidnapping, murder, and at least one HIPAA violation. It was also pretty fun to play to whet my appetite for Batman. Let’s get to it.

Bill Kunkel, enjoying a pizza in 2005.

Prior to doing my usual pre-game research, I had never heard of Bill Kunkel. That’s not unusual; while we have a few designers that we’ve come know very well, the majority of the staff in any given game is anonymous. I claim no special talent or access to sources, but a combination of Google and digging through old magazines and interviews usually gives us a picture. For some of these games, I enjoy the research even more than the playthrough! As I dug into Kunkel’s history, the information just kept coming: his writing projects, his impact on the history of video games, and even his battles with drug addiction. As a game journalist, he wrote hundreds of articles over four decades, not to mention fanzines on several topics, plus edited multiple magazines. He was an expert witness on several of the legal battles that shaped our industry. There’s no way for me to read and absorb all that in a couple of weeks, but he comes off to me as a fan’s fan. He loved conventions and fanzines, comic books and professional wrestling, and the gaming journalism that he would become famous for. Along the way, almost by accident, he ended up writing games. It’s a fun story– no doubt exaggerated by his own talent for self-promotion– but one that I am happy to share.

Bill’s writing career began in fandom, producing an independent science-fiction fan magazine called Genook when he was just seventeen years old. Genook was followed by Rats!, another fan magazine, but by this point he was establishing himself as a member of the New York fan community. It was through these fan-connections that he was introduced to Arnie Katz and Joyce Worley, a husband and wife pair who would become his long-time friends and collaborators. They are themselves worthy of a series of posts, a constant presence in almost every one of Kunkel’s projects. One of their first collaborations would be another fan magazine, Four-Star Extra, where the four of them would each write an article every month on a chosen topic. They introduced Kunkel to the DC writer and editor Denny O’Neil at one of their weekly fandom parties; it was through that connection that Bill sold his first comic book script, eventually to be published in the anthology comic House of Mystery. (Kunkel’s memoirs state that he sold this story in 1971, but the earliest I found it was in House of Mystery #252 in 1977. I am uncertain whether this story was shelved for many years, published without a by-line, or if the online comic book databases are incomplete for this period.) Based on this connection, Kunkel became a freelance “fill-in” author for DC comics, writing stories that would be held back and used if the regular stories of the issue were delayed. While they were sold, it is unclear how many (if any) were used by DC. It was not glamorous, but he was working in comics!

Several of Kunkel’s later games seem inspired by these early interests.

Without making it as more than a fill-in writer in comics, Kunkel embarked on a project in a different segment of fandom: professional wrestling. He and his near-permanent partners, Katz and Worley, wrote and distributed a magazine called Main Event featuring photography and articles about WWWF stars and matches. The WWWF was the precursor of the WWF and later the WWE. Kunkel both wrote and photographed for the magazine which was sold at WWWF events, with the support and permission of Vince McMahon, Sr. The magazine led Kunkel and Kats doing radio, a 1AM Main Event wrestling talk show on New York’s WHBI. Although Kunkel folded the magazine after a short time, he continued to love and write about wrestling for the remainder of his career.

By 1976, Kunkel was back writing comics. The second time was a charm and DC gave him higher profile work including a shot at reviving a 1940s character, “The Vigilante”, in World’s Finest. Looking back on his time at DC, Kunkel remarked that he worked on “Lois Lane, The Private Life of Clark Kent, Vigilante, romance stories, horror stories and Jor-El only knows what all else”. But Kunkel did not enjoy the corporate environs of DC and switched teams to work in the “bullpen” at Marvel. Once there, he worked on “Spiderman, Captain America, The Falcon, Wonder Man, Dr. Strange, and some fill-in stories that may still be sitting in the office files”. Even that work didn’t last long and he was shortly doing uncredited and low-paying work writing Richie Rich for Harvey Comics. He ricocheted around the industry, doing stints or freelance work for everyone that would pay him. By 1978 however, Kunkel’s life was falling apart. He was unable to make a living and considered himself a “parasite” on his wife and his marriage. By his own admission, he was already battling drug addiction. He needed a big break.

The very first “Electronic Games” in 1981. Can Asteroids conquer Space Invaders? We still want to know.

Kunkel’s “big idea” came in 1979 when he started writing “Arcade Alley”, a regular column in Video magazine. It is dramatically oversimplifying the story to say that he was onto something, that very few others were covering the nascent home video game industry. By 1981, this idea took form as Kunkel was able to convince Reese Publishing to back his new project, Electronic Games, with him as a writer and editor. The first issue soared off the shelves and the magazine quickly became a monthly, documenting and promoting the first era of home video games. Perhaps ironically, the magazine landed just as his marriage was ending. Kunkel was a leading voice in game journalism throughout the first age of video games, but the crash in 1983 that led to so many unsold E.T. cartridges also led to a decline in fortunes at Electronic Games. By 1985, he and his partners were out and the magazine’s first life was over. For Kunkel, Katz, and Worley, it was time to embark on the next phases of their careers. Enter: Subway Software.

Operating on their own once again, the trio formed two companies: one to further their journalistic pursuits and a second to design games. They had reviewed and discussed software for so many years– plus made many industry connections– weren’t they uniquely qualified to write games themselves? Nevermind that none of the three of them were programmers in a field where programmer-designers were still the dominant paradigm. From that idea, “Subway Software” was formed. The name was selected for the rather mundane reason that none of them (at the time) could drive. Instead, they traveled (and no doubt planned games) on the subway between their various homes around the city. They landed their first deal with Interplay and the rest, as they say, is history.

I have had some difficulty tracking down a complete list of games that Subway Software worked on, but between Wikipedia and MobyGames I have located seventeen games. Neither site appears to have a complete list and there may be inaccuracies. For our purposes, only four of them are adventure games and those credits appear to be correct: Borrowed Time (1985), Star Trek: First Contact (1988), Omnicrom Conspiracy (1990), and Batman Returns (1992). We’ll be looking at the first and last of those on this blog, plus the Star Trek game has been on my “want to play” list for some time. Subway Software appears to have closed its doors in 1992, just in time for Kunkel to start the “new” run of Electronic Games. We’ll look at that leap more closely and finish off his story when we get to Batman Returns.

My first time using an amiga emulator. I can’t seem to fix the aspect ratio.

Having come this far, there is not that much to say about Borrowed Time itself. As Kunkel and his friends were only providing the script and the design, the heaviest lifting was done by Interplay. Their game engine, already used for Mindshadow and The Tracer Sanction (both 1984), was done and supported a few different platforms. We’ve already looked at one game based on a later version of the same engine, Mike Berlyn’s Tass Times in Tonetown. Unlike Infocom who chose the least common denominator, Interplay believed in taking advantage of each platform capabilities. To that end, the graphics in each of the several ports are quite different. I’ll be playing the Amiga version as that appears to be the most mature of the several iterations.

Although I’ve focused on Kunkel, other credits on the game are no less important. We could have waxed equally about Brian Fargo, the plotter of the game, who founded Interplay Entertainment, worked on seminal games likes the Bard’s Tale series, and so many other things. He cut his teeth on The Demon’s Forge (1981), another early graphical text adventure we should look at eventually. He was joined in that role by Michael Cranford, another Interplay developer who was most famous for his work on Bard’s Tale.

The manual is about as boring as it is physically possible for a manual to be.

The manual itself isn’t very good, but it summarizes the plot well enough: “As private eye Sam Harlow, you must discover who is trying to murder you, collect the appropriate evidence and bring it to the police, while avoiding constant attempts on your life.” There is also a “Living Tutorial” at the start which provides a nice overview of the text adventure genre and how to play a game like this. I do not know why it is a “living” tutorial and they do not let you practice any gameplay; my impression is that they may have wanted to make it into a minigame but ran out of time or motivation. Even without being alive, it’s not a bad introduction to newcomers to the genre.

I am uncertain how much success this game garnered in its release, except to say that it must have been both successful enough for a re-release and not successful enough that no one thought name recognition would be valuable. It hit the bargain bins in 1989 as Time to Die. I have played through a bit of that version and, other than the logo, I did not immediately see any differences. With that, there is nothing to do but play the game!

Being a detective is so relaxing.

The Chase

The game opens in my detective’s office where I am sticking my feet up on a surprisingly bright day for a noir detective story. The phone rings and the voice on the other end warns me that someone wants me dead… A shadow darkens the window, but fortunately it’s just the window washer. Whew! Although not captured by my simple screenshots, the scenes are lightly animated. In this first scene, my feet is tapping a bit. In the next scene, the water cooler bubbles. In neither case is the animation more than a handful of frames, but it is a lovely touch.

I take stock: I’m carrying a wallet with my ID and a gun permit, plus a loaded handgun with six bullets. Is that a homage to hard-boiled detectives needing guns? Or a clue that I’ll have to be selective in how many people I shoot along the way? Searching the desk, I find an overdue alimony check made out to my ex-wife, Rita Sweeny. Could she be behind this? As I explore, I get the feeling that I am being watched. The writing is terse but tense. Just to the east, my secretary has her own desk notepad. She’s off at a dentist’s appointment, but she left me a note that “Mavis” called and wants me to get back to her. I try to call “Mavis” on my phone, but all I get is a busy signal.

Bang. I’m dead.

I hear a gun cocking somewhere and I head out of my office… and right into an ambush. A pair of thugs are approaching me in the alleyway. If I backtrack into my office, they catch up and kill me quickly. I try to replay the start of the game faster, but that seems to have no bearing on when they arrive. I try to shoot them, but the game criticises me for resorting to that kind of violence… right before telling me that I’m dead. I even try calling the police, but they have a busy signal as well. What kind of police force has a busy signal? I search for other ways out of my office. The window-washer’s platform comes to mind, but I can’t open or break the windows to get out. What am I missing?

After my tenth restore or so, I discover that while I cannot run back into my office, I can run into the hotel across the street. That takes me into a lobby with a single chair and a door to the north. I duck behind the chair and the thugs shoot at me unsuccessfully, From there, I can crawl to the doorway and emerge on a landing at the bottom of a stairwell. If I even stop to look at anything, the thugs catch up and kill me. If I go up the stairs, they catch up and kill me. It’s a very tense situation. It takes a few deaths (and a close look at the screen) to realize that there is a lock on the door. If I lock it first, the thugs take longer to bash their way through. That gives me time to race up the stairs into an empty attic, a dead end except for a locked window. Unlike at my office, I can break this window revealing a shard of glass and a way out. I pocket the glass just in time because the thugs are running up the stairs.

If I were in the circus, I’d be going on top of the wire.

Outside the window is a ledge, but there is a cable covered with laundry leading to the other side of an alley. I can cross it hand-over-hand to get to the window of the bar across the street. The thugs stop firing but now they follow my lead to cross the cable. This window is locked and apparently unbreakable so they have a couple of turns to catch up and throw me to my death. On my next attempt, I use my shard of glass to cut the cable and send them to the street below. With the thugs defeated, I am now allowed to enter the bar and descend to street level.

Inside the establishment, the barmaid tells me that she had seen the thugs outside and tried to warn me– she is the person from Irene’s message. She tells me that she saw Farnham’s man, Charlie Lebock, tell my wife and Fred Mongo that I would never finish my investigation. Before she can continue, she is spooked by the sight of someone in one of the booths and runs out into the street. There is a lot to unpack here. She specifically said “my wife” which might be Rita, or maybe I got married again? I’m not sure. You’d think I’d know that sort of thing. Does that mean that Rita is working with Fred? Does Fred work for Farnham? There are too many names and I can’t stitch it all together into a plot yet.

Relaxing at the bar.

Pausing for Breath

That was exciting! Since my character has a chance to pause for a breather, I will as well. The interface is interesting, but not quite as functional as it appears. It consists of four key areas: an animated image, a list of nouns, a list of verbs, and a graphical depiction of our inventory. The noun list looks like it’s supposed to be updating for where you are, but it doesn’t; it’s still “correct” for my office and not much else. The list of verbs is also incomplete and does not cover many of the actions that I just needed to take, including “hide” and “break”. (Not to mention the lack of connecting words!) I’m not sure how sophisticated the parser is, but it seems fairly good for its era with full-sentence recognition. Maybe not as mature as Infocom, but a far cry from the two-word era of the early 1980s.

I’m going to leave us here for now, just as the game is about to begin. This is an introductory post so please feel free to leave your guesses for the rating below. We’ll be posting the final part in two days so don’t wait! As far as score advice goes, the only related game we have played so far is Tass Times, which scored 47. It was also played 170 games ago (one of the first for the blog!) so our standards may have wandered a bit since then. And yes, it really has been 170 games. Doesn’t time just fly by?

Before we go, I’d like to introduce you to a new YouTube channel that I like already, Critical Kate and her Patreon. After I had drafted this post, I was doing some final spot-checks when I happened to notice that she had just written a detailed analysis of the works of Bill Kunkel. It’s a nice case of parallel evolution that we were both researching the same guy at the same time and came up with a similar set of concerns with the material, although her detailed look at the publishing history of Video magazine and his comics puts mine to shame. I used her research to make some final adjustments on this post. I hope you will check her out. See you soon!

Note Regarding Spoilers and Companion Assist Points: There’s a set of rules regarding spoilers and companion assist points. Please read it here before making any comments that could be considered a spoiler in any way. The short of it is that no CAPs will be given for hints or spoilers given in advance of me requiring one. As this is an introduction post, it’s an opportunity for readers to bet 10 CAPs (only if they already have them) that I won’t be able to solve a puzzle without putting in an official Request for Assistance: remember to use ROT13 for betting. If you get it right, you will be rewarded with 50 CAPs in return. It’s also your chance to predict what the final rating will be for the game. Voters can predict whatever score they want, regardless of whether someone else has already chosen it.

source http://reposts.ciathyza.com/missed-classic-69-borrowed-time-1985-introduction/

#retro games #dos games #retro #crpg #adventure #amiga #oldcomputers #8bit #16bit #blog #repost

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trendingnewsb · 6 years

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5 Superhero Movies That Are Only Worth It For One Scene

Bad superhero films are a treasure. Not only does one make you disappointed with Hollywood for creating a bad movie, but it also makes you doubly frustrated because they’re messing up something that you know is good in comic book form. However, we shouldn’t write off a bad superhero movie immediately. Upon closer examination, these terrible films can contain little glimpses of promise — little glimpses that make you say “This might be a secret masterpiece.” Or at least, “This doesn’t suck every poop.”

Batman & Robin — The Criminal Property Locker

In the annals of bad superhero films, Batman & Robin stands alone. It isn’t a “Well, maybe it’s not THAT bad” film like Superman Returns or Spider-Man 3. It isn’t a “I’ll forget the plot of this before I even leave the theater” film like X-Men: The Last Stand or Daredevil. It isn’t a “That’s a damn shame” film like Superman IV: The Quest For Peace or Robocop 2. And it isn’t a “If there is a God, they wouldn’t let this happen” film like Catwoman or Spawn. Instead, it’s a film that somehow gets both more amazingly terrible and more inexplicably enjoyable with time. I hate it and I love it in equal measure, and years after I’m dead, researchers will discover my skeleton clinging to a VHS copy of it, like Quasimodo and Esmeralda at the end of Hunchback Of Notre Dame.

But the movie does have one extremely cool split second. Now, there is a well-known Easter egg in Batman & Robin: When Bane and Poison Ivy are breaking Mr. Freeze out of Arkham Asylum, you get a glimpse of the “Criminal Property Locker.” And in the locker are the costumes of the Riddler and Two-Face from Batman Forever. That’s kind of neat — though since Two-Face died by falling into a spiky underwater pit, it does imply that some poor Arkham intern had to dry-clean and sew his fucking suit back together.

Warner Bros.

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thejohncamp3ablog · 6 years

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Justice League failed

As history has taught us, when your first movie makes cheddar, you stick with the bun.

In the case of Warner Bros. They played this game only once and it was called TDK trilogy with a bun called Nolan. Before that, they were playing a game, I like to call “the money men”.

You make a huge hit in 1978 called Superman, which went on to make around 300 Million worldwide, or as you kids now say, over 1.2 Billion (you know cause of the tickets price being smaller). Then for the return they got another director to finish the first guy’s job [Richard Lester] and by the third and fourth movie, this franchise was dead. Monetary the 300 Million turned to 15 Million. Later on, Donner [1st guy would release a director’s cut, which was awesome and much better than the original cut].

In 1989 after a few games of musical chairs prior, they made a Batman movie by Burton, that movie as estimated in 2017 is somewhere around the 900 million mark, Burton made a more dark sequel and WB executives had a heart stroke and went to replace him with Joel Whedon, who “MADE BATMAN GREAT AGAIN”, which resulted in their second superhero franchise death. We can mention Clooney here, nipples, ice puns, and Arnold [currently replaced by the Rock], but you all know how shitty those movies are.

So, in 2006 they decided to soft reboot Superman, modeled after a franchise that was nearing 28 years, over a model that worked for my grandparents, they flopped again with under 400 Million gross on a 270 Budget. But that was weird because later in 2013 critics would declare this specific interpretation of Superman “the ultimate truth”.

Warner’s, who one year prior had made a masterpiece of a movie with then indie director Chris Nolan and actor Chris Bale with Batman Begins, decided that if the re-booted version worked they should continue the old Superman version for some reason, unknown to progressive people, probably the “money men” said so in a company memo.

So in the case of Batman Begins, The Dark Knight and The Dark Knight Rises, you have a trilogy of movies, that are centered around one single character, no cameos or gimmicks that in 2017 have probably made a lot more than they did in 2005-2012, but still around the 2.5 Billion mark in USD. A single directors vision and execution, that worked.

Now when DC relaunched a single shared universe with Man of Steel [2013] and continued the story in Batman V Superman and Justice League, we had the classic 80s/90s WB Studio panicking about critical reception, when their fan base clearly said, “We like this different tone and we will pay for it”. The movies alone grossed around 1.5 Billion, with the addition of the other 2 movies Suicide Squad and Wonder Woman, the first four DCEU movies have been propelled over the 3 Billion mark worldwide. But in a trilogy created by the worst, fear of each critic, the dark lord Zack Snyder managed to scare all the kids and WB decided to bring in Joel Whedon to lighten it up again, which brings us to Justice League lowest DCEU opening of 93 Million, which is well deserved for a movie that made : “Batman go Clooney Tunes” , Superman grin like the Joker, Flash sexually assault Wonder Woman along with many more unwanted scenes and as usual Kevin Tsujihara standards [he used to be a tailor] cut 99.9 % of the movie and brighten it for kids. Jokes all over the place, just a big ass Joel Whedon classic joke fest with some Zack Snyder left overs.

The critics of course shitted on the movie and gave it an average consensus of 40 % on the only source for movies, the Fresh Cucumbers.

Now history shows us that movies in general are for movie fans, which in 2017 is dictated by comic book guys, who run companies that publish those books. In DC’s case their annual turnover is about 270 Million [+-]. Which depending on the price of a book [let’s say 3 USD] is 90 Million books spear across 108 titles, so the number of readers can be anything between 800 K and 90 Million, if we assume that one person buy one book and never again in 12 months buys another, which isn’t true at all. So, if we presume that a DC fan, follows all titles we might be looking into 800 K hard core fans or another case, buys 50 % of all titles regularly 1.6 Million fans or let’s say double that into follows every 4th book for 3.2 Million fans and for the sake of conversation I will presume another 800 K random fans and make it a round 4 Million fans throwing money at DC books each year. That would mean that on an average price tickets that is used by Box Office Mojo for 2017 8.93 USD, DC comics fan contribute around 35 Million dollars to the box office of their films, now I will assume that they are suddenly doubled, just for fun and make them 8 million and that would give us 70 Million dollars. With that money DC Films can easily cover a underperforming opening weekend at around 70 %. So why not show geeks and nerds the middle finder and just make movies for general audience with Superheroes that make sense? It worked monetary for them on so many grounded movies like TDK, MOS, BVS, Superman 78, Batman 89 etc.,

Funny thing is they addressed all those MOS and BVS complaints bit by bit in Justice League only to be served with a 93 Million opening weekend from those heroes country of origin the States, which love to check all sorts of sites that tell them what to do.

So there is 2 ways to do this, make grounded good movies with Superheroes in them and match their core from the comics, or pander to geeks and their nerdy sites and get used to 100 Million loses. Your choice WB/DC.

Also they announced their new banner yesterday, it’s called #DCKids and will be produced by Joss Schumacher and Geoff Feige !!

#MARVEL DCEU MCU DCCOMICS

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porchenclose10019 · 7 years

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The Many Times The 'Batman & Robin' Cast Have Trashed (Or Defended) The Movie

Google “worst movie of all time.” The first search result is “Batman & Robin.”

No list of history’s most inferior cinema would be complete without this infamous parade of excess, which opened June 20, 1997. Celebrating 20 years of kitsch imperfection, “Batman & Robin” is so widely mocked that even the people responsible for the film ― well, some of them ― have joined the chorus of disdain.

Joel Shumacher, who led the charge on “Batman Forever” and “Batman & Robin” after Warner Bros. asked Tim Burton to step aside, apologized for the movie as recently as last week. George Clooney has been issuing mea culpas for years. Arnold Schwarzenegger, on the other hand, has no regrets.

I admit I’m something of a “Batman & Robin” apologist, having worshipped Poison Ivy’s slithery eccentricities as an 8-year-old. Today, I see it as an admirably atrocious time capsule, from Mr. Freeze’s puns (”The Ice Man cometh!”) to the Dynamic Duo’s skates. Now that comic books rule Hollywood, a superhero train collision this singular must be treasured, rubber nipples and all.

In 2014, when I interviewed Uma Thurman with childlike glee, she linked the reception of “Batman & Robin” to audiences’ unwillingness to accept superhero stories that don’t revel in hyper-masculine aesthetics. Whether or not Thurman’s analysis holds weight, she waxed poetic about the evolution of queer sensibilities in a way that I’ll never forget. Thurman resisted applying the word “camp” to “Batman & Robin,” and she’s right. True camp has a certain self-awareness that this film distinctly lacks. It’s just a bloated, silly circus designed to produce toys and flashy marketing tie-ins and a best-selling soundtrack featuring Jewel, The Smashing Pumpkins and R. Kelly. That doesn’t mean it’s not also a fun relic of Hollywood’s evolving blockbuster culture.

Until Christopher Nolan put his own gritty spin on Bruce Wayne, “Batman & Robin” ended the big-screen Batman franchise. The reviews were so biting, and the audience interest so lukewarm compared to its predecessors, that Warner Bros. scrapped the next installment. Such a 180 only furthered its notoriety.

In honor of the 20th anniversary, here’s what Schumacher, Clooney, Thurman and others involved have said about the movie over the years.

Joel Schumacher, director

“There was enormous pressure on us to create more inventions in the film that could be turned into toys. I learned a new phrase in my life called ‘toyetic,’ [which means] whether a movie is ‘toyetic’ or not and how many toys people can get out of it. Hence, a lot of toys in this movie.” (2005)

“I broke a rule of mine, which is never to do a sequel of anything. ... But I was shooting ‘A Time To Kill’ and the studio had been very generous to me, and much was expected of me by the toy manufacturers and the Warner Bros. stores. I’m responsible for everything. I said, ‘yes’ and I took it on. It’s not my favorite movie I’ve ever made, but I’m proud of my cast and I’m proud of all the artists who worked on it. I take full responsibility for ‘Batman & Robin.’” (2011)

“I was the problem with ‘Batman & Robin.’ I never did a sequel to any of my movies, and sequels are only made for one reason: to make more money and sell more toys. I did my job. But I never got my ass in the seat right.” (2014)

“I want to apologize to every fan that was disappointed because I think I owe them that.” (2017)

“They obviously had very high expectations after ‘Batman Forever.’ But perhaps it was the more innocent world in comparison, I don’t know. I just know that I’ll always go down over the nipples on Batman starting with ‘Batman Forever.’ ... Such a sophisticated world we live in where two pieces of rubber the size of erasers on old pencils, those little nubs, can be an issue. It’s going to be on my tombstone, I know it.” (2017)

George Clooney, Batman

“I’ve been in those ‘Pluto Nash’ kind of movies ― ‘Batman and Robin’ cost $160 million ― and you know they’re a waste of money.” (2002)

“I just thought the last one had been successful, so I thought I was just going to be in a big, successful franchise movie. [And] in a weird way I was. Batman is still the biggest break I ever had and it completely changed my career, even if it was weak and I was weak in it. It was a difficult film to be good in. I don’t know what I could have done differently. But if I am going to be Batman in the film ‘Batman & Robin,’ I can’t say it didn’t work and then not take some of the blame for that.” (2011)

“They put nipples on the Batsuit. I didn’t know they would do that. If Batman had to wear the suit that you have to wear, everyone would die. ... Joel is very funny because he’d be like OK, George, remember, your parents are dead, you have nothing to live for, and action!” (2012)

“I think since my Batman I was disinvited from Comic-Con for 20 years. I see the comment sections on all you guys. I just met Adam West [backstage] and I was like, ‘Hey, I’m really sorry.’ He goes, ‘Give me a fist-bump,’ and I was like, ‘Just hit me.’” (2014)

“I always apologize for ‘Batman & Robin.’ I actually thought I destroyed the franchise until somebody else brought it back years later and changed it. I thought at the time this was going to be a very good career move. It wasn’t. The suit’s brutal. At the time, particularly, it weighed like 60 pounds.” (2015)

Chris O’Donnell, Robin

“I thought [‘Batman Forever’] was terrific. I really thought it was well made. With ‘Batman & Robin,’ I think Warner Bros. got piggy. It was too soon. If I remember correctly, it wasn’t too far after ‘The Fugitive’ came out. And if I remember correctly, ‘The Fugitive’ was kind of a mess when they were making it but they figured it out and it was a huge hit. And I think for a while, Warner Bros. was like, “It doesn’t matter. We can throw enough money at it and it’ll be a huge hit.” There needs to be a certain amount of time before people had the appetite, “I need another ‘Batman.’” We had just finished and all of a sudden it was, like, boom, here’s another one. There was a lot of waste. I felt it wasn’t tight and it wasn’t thought out. People just got greedy. That being said, I had a great time doing it.” (2015)

Uma Thurman, Poison Ivy

“It came out in a different time when people were still being bitchy about campy. Humor being campy and campy being a code word for gay has changed. ... I think at the time the idea of taking a male superhero and having fun with it and someone using the C-word [campy] on it caused people to be very nasty. And that kind of nastiness was acceptable on those terms. And I think that’s the reason some people were particularly annoyed. They didn’t like seeing that tone applied to their heterosexual male icon.” (2014)

Arnold Schwarzenegger, Mr. Freeze

“It’s always easy to be smug in hindsight, right? I don’t regret it at all. I felt that the character was interesting and two movies before that one Joel Schumacher was at his height. So the decision-making process was not off.” (2012)

Alicia Silverstone, Batgirl

“I feel like I could do a much better Batgirl now than I did then. It would be fun to tackle it again. Because I’m older and my acting is better. I know I would bring so much more to it. ... That costume was so uncomfortable. Maybe something more comfortable would be nice. Something you can sit in. Something you can get out of to pee.”” (2017)

Vivica A. Fox, Ms. B. Haven

“Woo! Got to work with Arnold Schwarzenegger. That was so cool. You know, my fondest memory of Ms. B. Haven is how Joel Schumacher came up with my name. [Laughs.] I said, ‘Where’d you get Ms. B. Haven?’ And he said, ‘Well, I was hanging out with my friends and we went to a state fair. And we’re walking, and one of the things they were doing was a display on monster trucks, and one of the trucks was Ms. B. Haven.’ And I said ‘That’s going to be one of the characters in my movie.’ And he met me and he knew it was going to be Vivica Fox. So I got the role. I was so excited, but I must tell you, my skin consumed so much glitter from that costume that my skin was extracting glitter for weeks. Glitter would just pop up, because your skin will absorb it.” (2010)

Akiva Goldsman, screenwriter

“What got lost in ‘Batman & Robin’ is the emotions aren’t real. The worst thing to do with a serious comic book is to make it a cartoon. I’m still answering for that movie with some people.” (2009)

Kevin Feige, current Marvel Studios president

“That may be the most important comic-book movie ever made. It was so bad that it demanded a new way of doing things. It created the opportunity to do ‘X-Men’ and ‘Spider-Man,’ adaptations that respected the source material and adaptations that were not campy.” (2009)

Hit Backspace for a regular dose of pop culture nostalgia.

-- This feed and its contents are the property of The Huffington Post, and use is subject to our terms. It may be used for personal consumption, but may not be distributed on a website.

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smokeybrand · 6 years

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This is Snyder

I don’t care for Zack Snyder. I don’t hate his craft as much as i hate Michael Bay, Snyder actually tries to make good movies, but i don’t find his schlock entertaining. He’s not a bad director, i guess, but his movies are always scatter-brained messes. I think Snyder is more a creative than a crafter. He’s the guy you want in your development stages, throwing out ideas and boarding those massive action scenes. If i were to equate him to a sports analogy, Snyder is the Offensive Coordinator on an American Football team. He’s the guy that builds the visual aspects of your scenes, the car who sets up the set pieces. He’s Mr. Battlemaster, the Attack Master, the guy you call in to adds little spice to your drama and conflict laden plot, not the guy you give the keys to an entire cinematic universe where you have to humanize godlike heroes. Emotional subtlety has never been Snyder’s strong point. Since the only DCEU film that was passable was Wonder Woman, the one flick that Snyder didn’t really have his hands on too much, i wanted to take some time and kind of dissect why i hate almost everything Snyder has ever made.

Dawn of the Dead

It’s been years since i’ve seen this movie but i recall enjoying it considerably. But it’s a zombie movie. And it wasn’t written by Snyder. That’s going to be a running theme in this; Other people’s stuff, Snyder is okay. His own stuff, not so much... Zack was only a Director on this flick which meas he just got to bring a script to life. He just got to pick the best scenes and build a cool looking movie. That’s Snyder at his best and it shows. For my money, DoD is his best film.

300

This was his breakthrough. 300 lends itself to Snyder’s style even more than DoD. The comic it’s based on is literally revisionist history written by 80s comic madman, Frank Miller. It is literally a series of splash pages with cool sh*t on them. In comic book speak, it’s literally a series of action set pieces. Splash pages are used to fill every inch of paper with dynamic, poignant, information. When every page of your book is a splash page, it conveys a sense of aggressive action. That is right up Snyder’s alley. There’s no room for plot or character development but that slow-mo buster kick to that persion dude was crazy dope, son! “THIS! IS! SPARTA!” It’s also a superficial, special FX laden, popcorn movie that is borderline sexist with all of the half naked dudes about but still, i had a good time.

Watchmen

Watchmen was the first Snyder movie i saw where i realized he was kind of out of his depth. Dude did his best to bring this unfimable story to the screen, and in some spots i think he did a really good job (Comedian’s arc was okay and that change toward the end made all of the sense to me) but overall, it lacked the emotional, philosophical, and political depth from the source material, you know, literally the reason why Watchmen is so goddamn brilliant. Snyder shot this movie like a mid 2000s cape flick. Think Raimi’s Spider-Man or X2 but infinitely more superficially, which is ridiculous because the Watchmen novel is infinitely more rich. WB kind of let up on Snyder’s leash a bit and he focused way too much on the sh*t that shouldn’t have been focused on. At it’s core, Watchmen is a character study of those old timey 80s archetypes and an indictment of the destructive materialism infecting society at that time. There’s a visceral moral question that my brother and i argue about all of the time and i believe Snyder stuck the landing, but he kept falling off the bar to get there.

Sucker Punch

Sucker Punch is one of the worst movies i have ever seen. The mechanics, the technical aspects of this movie, are just the worst. I can go into how this is basically a shittier version of Inception with the dream in a dram aspects or how that sh*t doesn’t make any sense in the movies established lore or timeline. I can go into how this thing technically takes place in between the five minutes that Babydoll is being moved from her cell to the lobotomy chair so none of it matter or how f*cking ridiculous it is that this woman’s name is f*cking “Babydoll”. Sucker Punch is wildly problematic and i’ve written at length about how i feel about it before, i think, but my point with this entry is to high light how messy this movie feels. This is Snyder wit h no brakes. This is Snyder unleashed, When left to his own design. THIS, Sucker Punch, is the type of movie Zack Syder wants to make. He wanted to explore the psychology behind being in such dire straights, the emotional and psychological rationale of those terrible circumstances but he also wanted naked chick, a dragon, and giant robot samurai in it. How does that work? You can’t put Nazi Zombies in Girl, Interrupted, man. that dog don’t hunt. i know because Sucker Punch tried it and IT was AWFUL!

The DCEU

I thought about doing these thing individually but considering he basically directed all of these f*cking movies (except Wondy) i can lump them all into one entry. WB mistook the success of the Grimdark Nolan Batman Trilogy as audiences wanted a bunch of edgelord superheroes. So they gave the Batman Begins treatment to f*cking Superman. And, to bring this car crash of an idea to the big screen, they give the reigns to Snyder. I don’t like Superman. I think he’s a terrible hero. How do you right him? What aspects do you focus on when the guy and turn back time by flying real fast? How do you make that asshole compelling? Snyder’s solution? Uncle Ben his ass! Guilt trip him into becoming the world’s savior! sh*t’s lazy son! Man of Steel was adequate though. it was good enough for the WB suits to hand the entire reigns of the DCEU over to this asshat and, oh boy, was that dumb! My chick is the biggest Superman fan and she hated this movie. For her, someone versed in the Kal-El mythos, this was an affront. From what little i know about Supes, i’d agree.

SO Snyder double-downs on his Batmanfication of Superman by literally introducing Batman into a Superman story. BvS is an abortion of a film. It destroys the archetype of what all of these heroes represent. Batman is a psychopath killer. Superman is a morose pussy. Lex Luthor is the goddamn Riddler from Batman Forever. It’s a goddamn mess. Which sucks because, at it’s core, there are a lot of good ideas here. I liked how Luthor was more Zuckerburg than Rockefeller. I liked the introduction of Wonder Woman, even if it felt a little forces at times. I liked at the whole “Punished Messiah” story line for Supes, even if it never got deeper than a puddle. I hated everything else. Everything was just too Snyder-y. Cool sh*t to look at as opposed to deep sh*t to identify with. But that’s what happens when you forgone character development for mech fights and a Doomsday story line that should have bookend a phase one of pictures. Seriously, Doomsday in the second goddamn movie of your fledgling franchise? No! no, im not going to get into that. We’ll address that later.

Suicide Squad was a goddamn mess. I know David Ayer directed that, and one day i hope we get to see that sh*t, but the studio brought Snyder in to fix what they felt was an unwatchable film. Seriously, Snyder is considered a “guest Director” on that film and it shows. Justice League is the same way but Joss Whedon kind of added a bunch of levity to this ridiculous film. While i think Justice League is trash, i also believe it’s the second best that the DCEU has produced, mostly because there was reprieve to ll of Snyder’s grimdark bullsh*t. Whedon was able to bring out the best of these characters. I eve liked Superman in this and i f*cking hate Superman. But that’s kind of my point. If you remove Snyder from the equation, you get solid sh*t! like Wonder Woman!

Everything about Wonder Woman screams dope. It reminds me of a Phase one MCU outing, which is a fitting tone for Diana’s adventures. It’s not a perfect movie, there area ton of issues with it, but overall, it is a delight. I think Gal Gadot gave her best performance and someone finally used Chris Pine in an advantageous manner. I think going full on Ares was a mistake but, in the context of the world, i get it. I thought this was a decent ride until the end. The climax was whack. Seeing as how Snyder is credited as a writer, i assume he wrote this part because it feels wildly Snyderish. Literally the worst pat of this film is the ending. Tonally, it’s ridiculous. It doesn’t fit. It’s poorly executed. But it’s fun to watch, i guess. That’s Snyder in a nutshell.

Ultimately, putting this guy in charge of the entire DCEU, which wanted to be a direct competitor to the MCU, was a mistake. His vision is ridiculous. He has too many ideas for any one film and with no one to reel that in, you get the mess that we have now. There are certain things that needed to happen in order for the DCEU to be relevant, to be good. Snyder doesn’t have the patience to execute like this though. He doesn’t want to put in the time to world build. He just wants to throw awesome looking sh*t on screen and move on. That, a good movie, does not make. If i had a say, i’d probably loosely follow the MCU Phases. That sh*t worked and gave ample time to develop a proper story. As an example, i’d have done something like this:

Phase One - Trinity

Movie 0: House of El. Prequel to the entire DCEU set in the final days of Krypton. You could establish all of the requisite Supermann necessities while also planting seeds for Brainiac, Doomsday, Apokolips, and Darkseid. This would be the backbone for the first three phases of your DCEU. Think Star Wars but with Krpytonians instead of Jedi.

Movie 1: The Batman or Gotham, dunno about that title yet, Definitely a Year one or Year Two Bat-story. I’d want to introduce The Long Halloween arc. Make it a noir, focus on the assumed Batman doing his detective thing, until the climax which would be an amalgamation of No Man’s Land and The Man Who Laughs. Like, Joker is holding the city hostage and all of the holiday murders were a distraction while he planted his trap. Batman would have to choose between his morals or vengeance in the end.

Movie 2: Superman Sequel. Calling this one Man of Steel as it would have both Superman and Metallo as the primary antagonist. I figure having Clark and Corbin duke it out makes for a clever title, you know? You can introduce Luthor as the mastermind, secretly collaborating with his miraculous AI that turns out to be Brainiac. Deathstroke could be hired muscle. Cadmus can be introduced. You get to see the introduction of Superman on a world wide scale as he and Metallo duke it out in the open. This would feel like that old Superman cartoon on the WB way back when. Light-hearted yet serious tone. Actual stakes. Sub plot of Lois figuring out Luthor is the reason all of the trauma occurs.

Movie 3: Wonder Woman. It will probably be a period peace set against WW1. It would pit her against Aries and the preconceptions of women during those bleaker times. The battle would be against disillusionment; trying to find a reason why Man should be defended or something of that nature. Wonder Woman would be more or less what we already got from Patty Jenkins, with a much better ending. Like, an actual pgysical fight with Aries seems dumb. If we have to go that course because of executive meddling, at least cast a better Ares. Make him more menacing and less inept. Motherboxes and a bit more of Apokolips will be introduced in this movie.

Movie 4: World’s Finest. Basically Batman against Superman while WW actually solves the real issues behind the scene. Like, she uncovers the underlying plot of the Motherboxes and actually tries to prepare for the coming of Steppenwolf. I really like the idea of Wonder Woman adapting her skill set to covert ops kind of like Motoko Kusanagi does. Also, you know, dudes is dumb and punchy. While Supes and Bats are having their tiff, Steppenwolf actually appears and engages the two of them. Ultimately, Wonder Woman arrives and the three of them, the Trinity, send ol boy packing back to Apokolips and the Motherboxes go dead. The Trinity is established, the seeds of Apokolips have been sown, and we can move into Phase Two - Justice League with the first movie of the lot; Death of Superman. Opening with the sidelining of the most powerful hero opens up a reason for Batman, having an established relationship with Winder Woman and Superman, realizing there are bigger things out there and a team might be necessary to combat them.

See, four movies, five if you count the Krypton prequel, and you’ve established the world, the main characters, the underlying conflict, and you have room to grow. You’ve developed characters, established the backbone to your entire universe, and given each of your principal heroes, Batman, Superman, ad Wonder Woman, their own outing, in the vein of their own themes. Grimdark works for Batman because he IS grimdark. Sh*t doesn’t fly with Superman or Wonder Woman. Diana is a warrior, set her story to the backdrop of a conflict to showcase her strengths. Superman wold spend his time trying to save Metallo, not murder him at the end of the goddamn movie because Supes is about believing in the good, not killing troubled assholes. Snyder didn’t have the patience to do this. He wasn’t building anything. He just wanted to put cool sh*t on the screen while trying to make everything dark and deep. He failed at both.

In closing, i don’t think Zack Snyder is a terrible director. I don’t. I think he has too may ideas and no one to reel him in when left to his own devices. When he is making someone else’s material, when he has a guidelines to follow and people keeping his rampant creative energy in check, he can be pretty good at his job, a la DOD or 300. Hell, i’d even give him Watchmen. But, left to his own devices, we get nonsense like Sucker Punch and BvS. Zack Snyder is everything that’s wrong with modern American cinema and it galls me to the core.

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rtawngs20815 · 7 years

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The Many Times The 'Batman & Robin' Cast Have Trashed (Or Defended) The Movie

Google “worst movie of all time.” The first search result is “Batman & Robin.”

In honor of the 20th anniversary, here’s what Schumacher, Clooney, Thurman and others involved have said about the movie over the years.

Joel Schumacher, director

“I want to apologize to every fan that was disappointed because I think I owe them that.” (2017)

George Clooney, Batman

“I’ve been in those ‘Pluto Nash’ kind of movies ― ‘Batman and Robin’ cost $160 million ― and you know they’re a waste of money.” (2002)

Chris O’Donnell, Robin

Uma Thurman, Poison Ivy

Arnold Schwarzenegger, Mr. Freeze

Alicia Silverstone, Batgirl

Vivica A. Fox, Ms. B. Haven

Akiva Goldsman, screenwriter

Kevin Feige, current Marvel Studios president

Hit Backspace for a regular dose of pop culture nostalgia.

-- This feed and its contents are the property of The Huffington Post, and use is subject to our terms. It may be used for personal consumption, but may not be distributed on a website.

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spynotebook · 7 years

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From Ramon Gil:

For decades, writer Elliot S. Maggin and I have had a rather one-sided relationship. Not only was he responsible for most of my childhood reading consumption, Superman comics in the ’70s, but he was also the author of the first two novels I ever read as a kid. Years later, as I was starting out as a comic book illustrator, it turned out that the husband of one of my best friends was acquainted with his cousin-in-law…or something like that. But before introductions could be made, the industry tanked in 1994 and I went into advertising. Twenty-plus years later, I decided to give comics another shot and managed to “Friend” Elliot on Facebook — and now here we are.

Elliot was the definitive Superman writer for over 15 years, pens novels and even ran for political office. My questions for him are endless but I managed to cut it down to a few. Here are his answers:

Ramon Gil: Can you tell us about how you broke into comics? You were 17. What was it like back in the ’70s?

Elliot S. Maggin: I was 19, actually, a junior in college. I had dropped scripts or ideas for scripts on comics editors here and there, but nothing seemed to stick. I had written op-ed pieces that The New York Times wasn’t interested in, but I had written some stuff for a few other newspapers and I had one piece of published fiction — so I knew it was possible. That was what I did when I was 17, got my first prose story published.

I was expecting to follow up college with law school. I had this famous professor send a hot recommendation for me to NYU Law and they’re still waiting for the application. If I decided to go into law now, I don’t suppose that recommendation would hold any water anymore. So in my junior year I was taking an American history class with this guy who actually won a Pulitzer a couple of years later, and this guy was kind of a pompous pedagogic sort. I asked the graduate assistant doing the grading if I could include a comic book script in a term paper on the history of media. He said sure, so I wrote a paper illustrating that comics were a viable political tool, and part of the paper was the script for an original Green Arrow story called “What Can One Man Do?”

I got a B-plus on the damn thing, and I asked the grad assistant why. He said he understood that I was going to illustrate the story too. So I got cranky and sent the thing to Carmine Infantino, who was publisher at DC Comics – National Periodical Publications in those days, actually (it wasn’t just pedagogues who were a little full of themselves in the ’70s, I guess) — and next thing I knew, I had an effusive letter from Julie Schwartz telling me he’d like me to try writing some of his other characters. At Julie’s request, I shortened my Green Arrow script from 20 to 13 pages and he bought it. That’s how it started. I’m told it hasn’t happened that way before or since.

RG: I’ve heard it said that once someone finds a “new way” to break into comics, they quickly shut that way down. So when Julie bought your script, was there any excitement about “breaking in” or did you just take it in stride?

ESM: It was a big deal. I was still an undergraduate living in a dorm, for heaven’s sakes. The sociology and American studies departments were all over it. I was second-ranking guy on the Brandeis campus newspaper editorial board, so I had a reputation as a good writer – although my editor-in-chief at the time, Richie Galant later of Newsday, has a Pulitzer hanging on the wall in his den these days. I think I’ve just got too damn many friends with Pulitzer Prizes for anything short of that to be much of a big deal.

RG: At what point were you freelancing and at what point were you on staff? Can you describe the progression?

ESM: As a writer I was never on staff. It was always month to month, meeting to meeting, for something like 20 years on-and-off. It was a bitch trying to buy a house. I never had, nor was I offered, what they called a “freelance contract,” which seemed like a contradiction in terms anyway. When I was an editor briefly from late 1988 to mid-1990 that was a staff position, but by then I was used to being my own boss. It was kind of a zoo. Nice health care coverage, though.

RG: Was this something you always wanted to do? How did you get into reading comic books?

ESM: I suspect I learned to read through street signs and comic books. I had a barber and a dentist in Brooklyn when I was a kid both of whom had loads and loads of comic books for people waiting to get a haircut or get their teeth drilled. I would pick up a comic book, and distract myself with it through my haircut or my dentist visit and generally they’d tell me to take them home with me. I guess I was about five or six when I realized that if you actually read the panel captions — instead of ignoring them like the introduction to The Scarlet Letter — you found out interesting and somewhat vital information. I didn’t realize Superman and Clark were the same guy, for example, until I found that information in the captions.

I didn’t really see myself writing comics, though, until the writing got lots better. With Denny O’Neil’s Green Lantern/Green Arrow stories 12 or 15 years later, for example, I started noticing that comics scripts could be the source of some really good storytelling. I didn’t so much notice, with those stories, that comics were a thing I might be able to do, but rather something I’d like to be able to do.

RG: At the time, did you feel you had taken the medium as far as it could go or did you feel that there was even more potential in terms of storytelling?

ESM: I certainly never felt I had taken the medium as far as it would go. I hadn’t even taken it as far as I could have pushed it with some lighter oversight. I wanted to get out there and work in other media, certainly, but storytelling in comics is still nowhere near where it could be. I’ve done academic papers on it.

RG: Oh man, I would love to read those papers! You obviously had an affinity for Superman, having penned him for as long as you did. How did you get that plum assignment?

ESM: I swear, it seemed no one but Cary Bates and I really wanted to write Superman stories. The character seemed passé, I think, even to people writing comics for a living. Denny (O’Neil) wrote Superman for more than a year before I showed up, and Len Wein did a bit too. But Denny just never much liked the character. He did some of the best work with the character I had ever seen, but he seemed to think it was just too unrealistic. He wanted grit. He wanted real life. So he decided he’d rather do stories about a bored, pissed-off billionaire who put on a costume and went around beating up bad guys every night. Realistic, he insisted. Go figure. It always seemed to me that a transplanted alien baby with super-powers was much more likely than that.

RG: Speaking of Cary Bates, how on Earth-Prime did he wrangle you into being part of the story in JLA #123-124? As a 9-year old boy, that really confused me as to whether or not superheroes were real! Did you guys fight over who got to be a villain and did Schwartz really call you “Magoon?”

ESM: Okay, Cary and I set a record for writing a full 24-page script on JLA #124. We started from scratch between 10 and 10:30 in the morning and we handed in the finished script as Julie was getting back from lunch at 1:00. And that included an hour-long subway ride. It confused a few of the grownups at the office as to whether or not superheroes were real too. I suspect there are guys still looking for the cosmic treadmill in hidden closets up there. We didn’t take that one seriously at all. It was like the Laffer Curve in economics. It was a joke that everyone else was taking seriously — except after a while even Arthur Laffer started to claim the crazy-ass theory he scribbled on a napkin as a grad student is for real, despite the fact that it’s been proved demonstrably wrong over and over.

Ryan and McConnell and the gang are still trotting it out for every budget debate. Cary and I figured the idea was to go so far over the top writing ourselves into a story that no one would ever do it again. And then — ka-POW! — along comes Grant Morrison making himself pivotal as a god figure in Animal Man and dozens of other people climb aboard over the years. I guess what our story really did was make it safe for writers like Grant to appear intelligent in fiction. Cary won a coin toss so he got to wear a costume and be the villain. And yes, Julie called me “Magoon” every chance he got. He found it amusing, although he was the only one.

RG: Were there any other books or characters you enjoyed working on?

ESM: All of them. I loved Green Arrow, because even with his overarching sense of self-importance I could make the guy funny. I even liked Batman a lot because it seemed to me the plots had to be pretty intricate and once you did the advance work figuring out where everything had to fit they pretty much wrote themselves. I liked writing stories about the girl characters: Supergirl, Bat-Girl, Wonder Woman. Always had a mad crush on Wonder Woman. Still do.

RG: Who doesn’t? I thought Lynda Carter was hot, but Gal Gadot is badass AND smoking! Any thoughts on the new Superman movies?

ESM: Nope. None. ‘Scuse me I’ve got to go write some more notes in my copy of Atlas Shrugged…

RG: Okay…any books or characters that you didn’t get to write that you wish you had? If so, why those?

ESM: Among DC characters, I always wanted to do Green Lantern — and Denny, who was writing GL, was always partial to Green Arrow — but Julie insisted the assignments were more properly placed where he put them. I wrote some for Marvel too over the years, but I always wanted to write Kull the Conqueror and Doctor Strange (LOVE Doctor Strange) but I never got the chance. If there’s anyone paying attention out there who’d like to commission a wild, weird-as-shit Doctor Strange novel, please call. You know where to find me.

RG: Ah yes, Dr. Strange. When I got your two books as a Christmas gift, the third book was a Doctor Strange paperback. Have you seen the movie?

ESM: I thought it was the best movie Marvel has ever released. Just so cool. I’ve been to Kathmandu, too. I think all those scenes were from a part of town called the Durbur District. I bought turmeric from a girl on the street there whose family have been selling spices in that street market for over a thousand years. Maybe sold turmeric to Marco Polo. I think even people who think Logan was the best Marvel movie think Doctor Strange was at least the second best one.

RG: My only problem was that it seemed to have more “martial arts” than “mystic arts”

ESM: Quibble quibble. Doesn’t it qualify as mystic arts if you drop-kick someone into the spirit dimension, no matter how perfect your kicking form is?

RG: In 1978 you came out with Superman: Last Son of Krypton, First in Warner’s New Series of Superman Novels and later on Superman: Miracle Monday. Were the novels your idea that you pushed for or where you tapped?

ESM: It was my idea. I told pretty much everyone I knew that what I wanted to do was write books. When I wrote a film treatment for a Superman movie and first Alfred Bester and then Mario Puzo showed up at the office to talk about writing Superman I decided my treatment and I were in over our head. But I went upstairs to Warner Books and managed to sell my treatment as an outline for a novel. The original plan was for it to come out midway between the releases of the first and second Superman movies to keep excitement up. I understood they were going to publish a novelization of the movie – which my book was decidedly not – but Mario Puzo had snagged the rights to produce a book (my brother tells me that Mario’s son Gene was supposed to write it; turned out they were high school pals) but soon it became clear that the producers’ plan all along was to use Mario’s name to sell the movie and get someone else to write the real script. Mario’s original script – except for the ending – was damn good, by the way, and Mario was pissed. I’ve read that the powers that be just didn’t want to pay the price of a book Mario oversaw, but I don’t think that was the issue. I think he blocked a novelization of the script from happening – so my book, Last Son of Krypton, was released as though it was the same story as the movie. Lots of people were disappointed when they found out it wasn’t, but people read it, and a lot of them liked it. The thing sold off the hook.

RG: “Last Son of Krypton” and “Miracle Monday” were the first novels I ever read as a kid. The depth of detail, the richness of the characters and the integration of historical figures really opened my eyes as to what fiction writing could be. Were these things that you’d been wanting to do for a long time or were these “exercises” that were forced upon you by the medium.

ESM: So I was how you learned what you can do with novels? Hah!

RG: Oh yeah, I think that was the year I wrote a story in class and the principal had to have a talk with my folks about how good it was!

ESM: You must’ve had the same principal I did, the ignoramus.

RG: I grew up in a country where English wasn’t the primary language. Metaphors were a big deal!

ESM: One of the cool things about writing novels is that there isn’t much forced on you by the medium. Structurally, they’re pretty freewheeling, and when literary talent scouts like literary journals and small magazines and look for unknown talent, what they’re often looking for are people who are willing to try new things with the language and the prose. You can write a novel that’s a string of correspondence and responses. You can put a novel into first-, third- or even second-person narrative, or set the tense however you think best tells the story. Generally novels are not at all visual, and you can use that characteristic to withhold information from readers – or characters – until a crucial moment; mystery and thriller writers do that a lot.

I didn’t do much that was innovative in terms of structure or storytelling with those two books, but because I had been working primarily in comics for years when I wrote them – in a medium that depends on artists to convey visual information – I was very spare in my visual descriptions. Instead of describing the way a person looks, I tended to let the character’s actions or manner fill in that information. The process of storytelling in novels, very often, is about choices, about what to hold back. Because of my experience in comics, I think in my novels I have been able to concentrate on metaphor and example when otherwise I might have gone a little overboard trying to make up for the medium’s limitations where that wasn’t really necessary.

RG: Any influences as far as other authors or writing styles?

ESM: Contemporary or modern writers I like are Vonnegut, William Goldman, Orwell, Ellison, Isaac Singer, Asimov and others. Love Bradbury too, but I can’t see that his work was influential in my work, as opposed to stuff I just wanted to read. As far as the people who pretty much invented the medium, I’ve always thought Mark Twain was head-and-shoulders above anyone else. Hemingway is up there and so is Steinbeck. The thing about Steinbeck is you can hear the gravel in his voice through his narrative. I’ve got no idea how he does that. Stephen King (the world’s most under-rated novelist) has this habit of evoking a reader’s proximity by picking metaphors that slide into the narrative subject matter – if he’s talking about food something will be as white as cream cheese; if he’s talking about mortal danger the same thing will be as white as a corpse’s eyelids. Steinbeck didn’t do that; someday maybe I’ll study Winter of Our Discontent and Grapes of Wrath enough to figure out how he does it.

RG: What kind of reaction did you get from comic readers and the industry in general when these were released?

ESM: Seriously, I don’t think I met anyone who read Last Son of Krypton until eight or ten years after I wrote it. I always had this fantasy of seeing all these secretaries in the subway who crowded on the train in Jackson Heights sitting in a row across from me all buried in copies of my book. Never happened. I know for a fact that no one (NO ONE!) at DC read the first book before it came out because the business about the stolen Xerox copiers – the reason the Xerox book club ordered 50-thousand copies – would never have made it into the final manuscript. They were so paranoid up there that you couldn’t mention any commercial product or property, even if it was arguably to that product’s benefit. Sometime in the late Eighties I got a call from Mark Waid who wanted to talk about the books. Mark was writing for fan publications back then and he treated me to a really good lunch at a Chinese restaurant for which I’ll be eternally grateful.

RG: I owe you lunch at a Chinese restaurant then.

ESM: I did get some terrific fan mail through Warner Books on both novels, and Last Son sold something like 450-thousand copies to someone or other, so I guess the response of the world in general was lots more significant than that of the industry.

RG: Was there any desire or attempts to do novelizations of other DC characters?

ESM: I don’t know. I wasn’t in that loop, and no one asked me to do any more books like that until I did the Kingdom Come novel fifteen years later. Paul Levitz slipped me a script for Superman III, wondering if I’d like to do an actual novelization. When I read it I didn’t even want to go see the movie (and I haven’t). By the time I got involved with Kingdom Come, people were adapting comics series into novels pretty routinely, and DC, Marvel and Dark Horse had developed a set of contractual standards for novel adaptations that were far more restrictive than those I had negotiated earlier. Around the time I wrote my Superman books Len Wein and Marv Wolfman wrote a Spider-Man novel together that was pretty good, but there was not much else as far as I can recall.

RG: Up until the 70s and early 80s, comic books were being written mostly for kids and teens. And for decades, most of these readers would just outgrow comics. But then in the 90s the stories became more serious, more complex, sometimes darker. You could say they “matured.” Can you share your thoughts on this trend in the comic industry and how you took part, if at all?

ESM: Julie Schwartz used to tell me that his old buddy who preceded him as Superman editor, Mort Weisinger, always said that he was doing fairy tales for children. “Once upon a time in the offices of the Daily Planet …” If in Julie’s judgment the kid audience couldn’t really grok a story I’d have to come up with something else altogether. But then again, my first Superman story, “Must There Be a Superman?” was about space opera and bad guys and distinctive visuals, but what it was really about was the sociological implications of having an omnipotent being around to bail us out of disasters. I think kids can understand all that stuff. The trick is making it simple enough for editors to understand too.

RG: Are you reading comics now? Any favourites?

ESM: I’m not really. I read The March trilogy by Lewis, Aydin and Powell not long ago. Thought that was terrific stuff.

RG: You eventually left monthly comics. Would you mind telling us about that and what it was like to move to a new career/industry?

ESM: Comics was never really what I wanted to do forever. But writing was. At one time, law and politics were my real long-term interests, but it occurred to me I wasn’t really much good at either. Right now, I spend most of my time working with a big string of hospitals teaching doctors and nurses how to use their software. A doctor said the other day that my job is basically my hobby. I said yeah, pretty much, but what the job is really about is a scheme to get my kids through college. Now they’re both grown and suitably degreed and my daughter told me a few years ago I was allowed to go out and play now – which I’ve been doing more and more the past few years. I think what I’d like to do for a career when I leave my current job is collect third-world countries and off-the-beaten-path experiences.

RG: The road less traveled! So getting back to Kingdom Come. How did your involvement come about?

ESM: So Mark calls me up and says he wants me to do a novel based on Kingdom Come and have I seen the comics series. I hadn’t, but how would I feel about doing the book. I said I really didn’t want to do it. I had just written a book based on a comics series and it wasn’t so much fun. Mark said he’d send me what he had so far: two published issues of Kingdom Come, lettered pencils of a third one and the script of the fourth. I said I always liked his sensibilities about this stuff, but unless DC was going to offer me the same deal they’d given me years earlier for Miracle Monday I didn’t see how I could do it. So he sent me the stuff, I read it, and when I got to the end of the script of the last book I saw he dedicated the damn thing to me. So I called him back and said he’d put me in a lousy bargaining position by doing that. Now I had to write it.

They have a really horrendous licensing agreement with novels now; nothing like what I had negotiated years earlier for Miracle Monday, and they are pretty rigid about it. So I told them I’d go along with their appalling royalty arrangement if at long last they’d reprint Last Son and Miracle Monday. They said sure, yeah, whatever, but that was a separate negotiation and we’d have to do it after we nailed down Kingdom Come. So I wrote Kingdom Come and after that no one was interested in talking any more about what else I wanted to publish.

Negotiate first and do the work later. Live and learn.

RG: What about Generation X? I think that was your first Marvel novel, can you tell us a little about that?

ESM: It was my only Marvel novel. I did it because Scott Lobdell is a friend and I wanted to get my feet wet doing novels again. It got cut up to fit the word count they wanted so I didn’t think it made as much narrative sense as I liked, but I did a comic book adaptation of it later (Does that qualify as a graphic novel?) that was a bunch of fun. I decided probably it was time I stopped looking to do licensed material and do my own. So besides exercising my reprint agreement on Miracle Monday, that’s what I’m doing now.

RG: From the 90s to the early 2000s, you also worked on a few films. I’d love to hear more about some of them. Were these your own projects or where you brought in primarily to write?

ESM: Nothing ever got out the door, but that’s generally the way it works. I did a script called Junior Sheriff based on an idea from a producer who never got the script into production. I did a couple of scripts for films based on Norse mythology – one on spec and the other on assignment. I spent years doing film and television scripts on spec or for early stages of projects that didn’t go the distance. I found I wasn’t writing for an audience so much as I was selling options. You can make a pretty good living that way, but you might as well be working on Wall Street. I always said I’d rather be read than paid, and I would. So now every minute I can, I sit in a room and make shit up. That’s what I love to do. I got an ebook out on Amazon last year called Not My Closet – all original stuff and very rarely does any character fly under his own power or wear Spandex. I’m currently working on getting a print version out.

RG: Ha ha! I love that! “said I’d rather be read than paid.” I’d use it as a pull-quote but future publishers might use it against you when negotiating.

ESM: Hey be my guest. Please. Listen: anytime anyone negotiates his way out of a work-for-hire contract an angel gets his wings.

RG: Did you ever direct or have any desire to?

ESM: Nope. Never got that bug.

RG: Let’s talk more about “Not My Closet.” was this a book you’d been wanting to tell for a long time? What was your personal stake in this story?

ESM: It’s a story for which I put aside some other projects and to which I’ve since gone back. It was one of the more difficult things I’ve ever written, and my first book about apparently real people. Some of it is based on real stuff from my life, most of it is made-up. The version out there is my fifth draft. I mean like a full-blown novel written five times. I never took more than four months to write anything before – a book, a story, a script, anything – and this took more like five or six years. Really. Putting it out there taught me one important thing: it seems I don’t know a damn thing about marketing. I’m working on that. Thanks for asking.

RG: That’s ok. I’ve spent the last 20 years in advertising and I’m still having a hell of a time marketing my own work.

ESM: Let me know if you come up with any good tricks. Like maybe making people believe a book is a movie tie-in when it isn’t. Stuff like that.

RG: Brilliant move on your part. Not sure if you could do it twice, though! So now we have this reissue and audio book of Miracle Monday. Why that instead of Last Son of Krypton which came out first?

ESM: Contractual reasons. I put a clause in the original Miracle Monday contract that provides for reissuing the book if it’s been out of print for five years. It’s been about 35. The journalist A.J. Liebling used to say “Freedom of the press is guaranteed only to those who own one.” It occurred to me that now that we live in the twenty-first century we all pretty much own one. So I put together a publishing corporation, applied some of my programming skills and got the book out the door. As I write this, the audiobook is unfinished – mostly because I’ve been nursing a virus for the past few weeks and my voice hasn’t been up to completing the last two chapters of Miracle Monday. I’m doing the reading myself not because I’m too cheap to hire an actor – which I guess I am too – but because I want there to be no doubt as to where Metropolis is. You’ll be able to hear it in my voice.

We’ll get working on Last Son of Krypton when we see how this shakes down.

RG: I hope so. Last Son is actually my favorite of the two. I mean Einstein!

ESM: I like Einstein. He’s in Not My Closet too.

RG: You’ve always been a very active in politics. You even ran for office at one point. Has there ever been a desire to write political fiction? Inject your own views heavily into your comics or novels?

ESM: I think when I was interviewing for colleges – when I was 16 or 17 – I really wanted to write that stuff and I told interviewers so. They always wanted to know about what I was reading, and my recreational reading at the time was pretty eclectic. So I’d talk about Fletcher Knebel or Irving Wallace and then I’d bring up McLuhan or Orwell or Huxley, who were all fascinating to me. My interviewers seemed much more interested in talking about the latter. I still like stories about political intrigue, and I’m doing a trilogy of those types of novels now, but they also involve time travel so I don’t know what kind of category they’d fit into.

RG: I love writing about the political aspect of stories! What’s NotFakeNews.org?

ESM: NotFakeNews.org is a website I came up with one weekend afternoon when I was sitting in Starbucks writing and a couple of friends showed up and I insisted they hang around and rescue me from being productive. It was when Donald Trump was president-elect, I think, and somebody – maybe I did – said we should publish material that was specifically labeled “Not Fake News.” We thought this was uproariously funny, and before the afternoon was over we set up both a website at NotFakeNews.org and a Facebook page of the same name. Whenever I come across an article somewhere that ought to be made up stuff but isn’t – scientists stashing climate data on a Canadian server so it can’t be trashed by the climate-deniers who run the EPA at the moment; speculations about the eleven-dimensional universe and the nature of reality; a lot of the stuff Matt Taibbi writes for Rolling Stone; like that – I try to upload it and cite its source.. Not many people have noticed it, as far as I can tell, but it’s a lot of fun. I’m especially proud of the way I set it up to display in four columns feeding from a database. I’m a programming geek; wrote the interface mostly in ColdFusion.

RG: I think you just need to add some social media links so people can “share” the site. What were some of the hurdles (political, logistical, legal) you had to deal with in getting Miracle Monday out again?

ESM: It helps to know how to program. It also helps to have a good lawyer. Hi Phil.

RG: It just occurred to me…what did you write the Superman novels on? A word processor? Did you have to have Miracle Monday transcribed for the ebook?

ESM: I wrote those two novels on a manual Olympia typewriter. It used to follow me around wherever I went. I had some transcribing help this time around.

RG: Was there any temptation to tweak or rewrite?

ESM: No rewriting, and I managed to keep any tweaking to a minimum – mostly grammar and usage. The story is kind of suspended in time with Eighties expressions and cultural references, and I like it that way.

RG: So what’s next for Elliot S. Maggin? Any thoughts to going back to doing monthly books? You mentioned you want to do creator-owned.

ESM: Times have changed since the last quarter of the last century and so have I. Owning your own stuff and getting it out in the wind is much more possible than it was a thousand years ago. Again, I’m trying to learn something about marketing. Turns out that’s a real discipline a guy needs to master. Who knew?

RG: Do you have a preference between prose and comics? What would you say the appeal is for each medium?

ESM: I like prose a bit more these days, only because the product is something that comes from just me. No collaborators necessary. But comics are the people’s medium. I think any given comic book we produce today has a better shot at immortality than any given chunk of prose, all things being equal.

RG: If you could do whatever you want, what would be your ultimate dream project?

ESM: At the moment, it’s my political time travel trilogy. To make it my dream project I think I want to get on a train in St Petersburg and take my laptop on the Trans-Siberian Railroad, write like a demon, watch the snow settle on the steppes and drink vodka with leggy Russian babes all the way to Beijing.

Ramon Gil is a comic book writer and the creator of The Hard Code, The Men from DARPA and Senturies, now on Kickstarter.

A Conversation With Elliot S. Maggin: “Anytime Anyone Negotiates His Way Out Of A Work-For-Hire Contract, An Angel Gets His Wings”

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