Ty: This is a roundtable prompted most recently by the bomb that is THE MARVELS. Ruth's "Another review of THE MARVELS saying skip it," Isaiah's "I hated THE MARVELS" and Stan's "THE MARVELS" covered the disappointment. Comic book movie fatigue? Sure, but there's more going on then that. Stan?
Stan: I talked to C.I. about that movie before it came out and after and we were both in agreement that the superhero films had been doing the same wrong thing over and over. So we thought this would be a good idea for a roundtable.
Ty: And participating are The Third Estate Sunday Review's Ava, and me, Ty; Rebecca of Sex and Politics and Screeds and Attitude; Betty of Thomas Friedman Is a Great Man; C.I. of The Common Ills and The Third Estate Sunday Review; Cedric of Cedric's Big Mix; Mike of Mikey Likes It!; Ruth of Ruth's Report; Marcia of SICKOFITRDLZ; Stan of Oh Boy It Never Ends; Isaiah of The World Today Just Nuts and Ann of Ann's Mega Dub.
Ty (Con't): Some have compared the superhero to the western or the musical and feel it is an a genre that has played itself out. Thoughts?
Cedric: I would agree with fatigue. There have been too many. But I don't know that the genre is played out.
Isaiah: I was talking to a friend on Friday and she said she thought the the comic book movie should have ended when Robert Downey Jr.'s death in AVENGERS: ENDGAME.
Mike: That would be stupid. That's a MARVEL movie. Why would you end DC movies due to a MARVEL movie?
Isaiah: That's what I said. And then I pointed out that DC is actually the better one. In the last two decades, it's been MARVEL but, historically, DC has done a better job in terms of TV and movies.
Rebecca: I'm jumping in. DC had the first huge problem and it was Halle Berry's CATWOMAN. And that's been the problem ever since. Michelle Pfeiffer was amazing as Catwoman in BATMAN RETURNS and no one was able to be that amazing again in terms of women. When the long promised CATWOMAN was finally made it was hideous. And the reasons that made it so awful have continued to destroy so many movies.
Betty: Really good point. I want to work 'woke' in at some point so remind me on that but CATWOMAN should have been a solid film but it had Sharon Stone as a villain that was barely written. And she was only the villain because apparently everyone was afraid of female Halle Berry fighting a man. Michelle could do it but apparently that was a one-time only. And you saw something similar in films like CAPTAIN AMERICA: CIVIL WAR when it was female against female in the fighting at the airport. On the plus, when it was just Black Widow in the films, she did take on men in fight scenes. Rebecca's right, it's been the treatment -- mistreatment -- of women that's really harmed the comic book films and TV shows.
Stan: WANDAVISION was f**k s**t garbage and I'm sick and tired of people pretending otherwise. It was garbage. It was insulting and it was sexist and it's so bad that maybe the only answer right now is no women directing female superheroes unless they actually like superhero comics, this is not for the Richie Rich or Archie's crowd.. I'm serious. I'm sick of the cutesy and the rainbow bright bulls**t in the comic book movies and TV shows.
Marcia: Agreed. I'm not watching a superhero for some college bimbo to work through her dissertation on the evolution of the sitcom.
Betty: I'm going to jump in with woke. 'Woke' in quotes is how I refer to corporations trying to pretend that they're aware and diverse. So they hire these idiots who don't understand the basics. Here they are: A superhero film or show requires that we see the lead character take on bad guys. It's not that hard to understand. But for bimbos hired by DISNEY-MARVEL, it seems really difficult. So instead of giving us heroes battling evil, they give us SHE-HULK GIRL LAWYER and other crap. They would never, ever take Hawkeye and put him in an limited series where the bulk of the episodes were about how he was a sitcom dad. But they think that's how you handle female characters. It's sexist and it's insulting.
Rebecca: Agreed
Ann: And Ava and C.I. covered this repeatedly -- "TV: Can anything be worse than fall 2020?" and especially see "TV: The way things are or are thought to be" and "Media: They lie."
Rebecca: And that's why they exist, to tell the truth as opposed to nonsense The Water Cooler set churns out. They are responsible, these liars, for encouraging this crap. We arrive at THE MARVELS due to their lies. No, it's not good to bring a character from the awful WANDAVISION and treat her as an equal to Captain Marvel or to do that with Ms. Marvel. Captain Marvel should be the star of a Captain Marvel film.
Isaiah: And when she was, in the first one, people turned out to see it. But we don't want to sit through kiddie nonsense. MARVEL has treated too many properties with female leads as though the characters were Wendy out of the CASPER comics. Or, as Stan said, rainbow bright. It's garbage. We expect to see supeheroes.
Marcia: And we expect to see them battle real villains. To go to DC, that's where the second Wonder Woman movie failed. You had a director that didn't want to show violence. It was fine to have violence when it was a world war but now it was 1984 and she wasted everyone's time. I'm not sad Patty Jenkins got fired. WONDER WOMAN 1984 was embarrassing. The CGI with Cheetah was awful but the whole storyline was an embarrassment. And this was a case of Wendy-izing Wonder Woman. If you can't handle the genre, if you're opposed to violence, don't direct a superhero movie.
Mike: That's where CAPTAIN MARVEL worked. It had a great cast -- Brie Larson, Samuel L. Jackson, Annette Benning and Jude Law among others. And it had these great actions scenes. But Ms. Marvel? That show built up to . . . a male superhero! Look at what actually happened on that show and the infnatilization of Kamala. The latest Spider-Man was portrayed as young but he was not turned into an infant. It was disgusting. And then to shove her off on Captain Marvel for THE MARVELS?
Rebecca: Can I bring in BLUE BEETLE?
Ty: Sure.
Rebecca: That was an awful film too. It didn't have to be. But the idiot directing didn't know a damn thing about visuals. Bruna Marquezine looks outright ugly throughout the bulk of the film. She plays Jenny. It looks as though her head is flat and her face does not work with that awful middle part. When they go to the compound where Blue Beetle is being held, please note, they've finally done something to her hair and, even better, when she shows up at the end on the motorcycle, she's got a part that's no longer down the middle. She looks wonderful and a real director would have looked at the tests shot for hair and make up and said, "No!" so that her hair would've looked right in every frame of the film. But a real director would never have hired Xolo Mariduena for the lead. He is not attractive. It's not the big nose but it's the weirdness of it -- look at him in profile -- and the fact that when shot straight on, he looks like a pig and it looks like we're shooting up his nostrils. I'm not done by the way, I've got quite a bit to say here. Finally, a male hero who is naked. Sadly, it's one we don't want to see naked. His face isn't the only problem. He's supposed to be 22. Why does he have a body like a high school nerd? They knew he was going to be nude. He's hairless, he's too thin and he's a joke. And let's deal with the lack of muscles. If we're supposed to root for him, we need to be able to. And if all the fighting strength and skills is nothing but the gift of tech, then why are we vested in him? He needed to have some muscles on his body. His side burns were disgusting and in some sort of diagonal growth manner. Everything about him was unappealing. It's the same disdain for women -- turning them into infants onscreen or thinking you can stick some ugly man in a lead role and trick us into salivating over him.
Betty: I gotta agree on that. And, like Rebecca, I thought, "What a waste." Because when Blue Beetle goes back to human, most of the time -- it's supposed to be every time but it doesn't happen in the last third of the film -- he is nude after the change back. And instead of getting a young man in the role, we were stuck with an awkward little boy. He's not a high schooler, he's a man who has just gradudate from college.
Ty: So what's the solution?
Betty: People getting real woke. Stop hiring the bimbos. The bimbos get hired in the first place because they're not questioning the male power structure so the men in charge are more than comfortable working with them. We don't want cutesy. We want strong women.
Ruth: Barbara Stanwyck played one strong woman after another in film after film. The answer is good directors. And turning them into 'female collectives' is not an answer. Feminist collectives? Sure. But bunch of giggly overgrown girls who produce garbage like WANDAVISION is not the answer. Stan had a good point about auteurs.
Ty: What was that, Stan?
Stan: Stop chasing the same film over and over. Get an auteur and turn them loose on a superhero film. It could really pay off. Tim Burton changed the Batman films, for example. Bryan Singer redid what we expect with the X-Men films. We need an end to the sameness.
Marcia: And we need real villains. Not nameless aliens from outer space like in the first Avengers film. And don't bring in Cheetah and disappear her for half the movie. Grasp that Sharon Stone as a new cosmetics bad guy is not necessary, there are legions of villains in both DC and MARVEL. We want real villains. That's why the Iron Man movies worked, why THE BATMAN worked, etc.
Ty: Okay and on that we'll wrap up.
