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Author Topic: WandaVision (Disney+)  (Read 13097 times)
Hoax
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Reply #35 on: September 25, 2020, 08:08:07 PM

DD had incredibly long grunty, violent grimdark fights that lasted for fucking ever.

I never really got past that. Also Daredevil is a lame as fuck character so I guess it was always going to be harder to win me over but for real the fights were awful like the super hero equivalent of Bay Transformer "fights". Not that bad but bad.

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MahrinSkel
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Reply #36 on: September 25, 2020, 08:20:05 PM

DD had incredibly long grunty, violent grimdark fights that lasted for fucking ever.

I never really got past that. Also Daredevil is a lame as fuck character so I guess it was always going to be harder to win me over but for real the fights were awful like the super hero equivalent of Bay Transformer "fights". Not that bad but bad.
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HaemishM
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Reply #37 on: September 25, 2020, 08:57:07 PM

Daredevil had some of the best coordinated fights on television, especially in the first season with that hallway homage to Old Boy fight.

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Reply #38 on: September 26, 2020, 05:14:22 AM

I couldn't make it through a single episode of daredevil. TV hero stuff, particularly netflix is all exactly the same kind of terrible. Shitty b tier heroes doing shit b tier shit. The property doesn't even matter.

Mediocre actors playing mediocre roles. I don't even consider any of the television Marvel shit prior to WandaVision to be MCU adjacent, including shit that is. It's just soap opera with masks (sometimes).
Khaldun
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Reply #39 on: September 27, 2020, 06:17:30 AM

There was something of value in DD, JJ and Cage. Iron Fist was a mistake and a kind of baffling one at every level--I'm assuming that one of the appeals of doing Shang Chi was to show that the MCU can do martial arts right.

But basically, each of the properties was brought down by having way way way too many episodes in a season package, by being overly embarrassed at the concept of superheroes, and by not having enough focus on their best ideas and stagings.

Ultimately all four committed the ultimate sin in an age of too much good television: they were all boring for way too much of their air time.
Hoax
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Reply #40 on: September 27, 2020, 06:34:02 AM

Daredevil had some of the best coordinated fights on television, especially in the first season with that hallway homage to Old Boy fight.

yes when they ripped off old boy that was a fantastic fight scene, credit there. most of the fights versus swarms of deadly hand redshirt ninjas in particular were all incredibly fucking boring. imma be honest. DD just didn't stick with me. I remember foggy, annoying blonde, Rosario and Kingpin (who was especially good and whose storyarcs seemed good) and I remember kung fu guy showing up. but i also remember that every episode had like half a day too much of "realistic" grunting bloody combat. ultraviolence worked great in Punisher and i think it was supposed to be a key story element of DD but honestly it was boring as fuck.

there's a reason comics rarely (at least how i remember them) focused on beating up armies of grunts. that shit is boring. DD was like, every episode we gotta beat up 3 dozen grunts but also DD has to get really fucked up and then we can do a scene of how fucked up he is, it was just tiresome. there was too much of it. what i remember of spider man and iron man and sleepwalker when i collected them was that almost every cover told me "hero takes on X super villain in this issue" because that's what i want to see. not fucking hydra redshirts or ninja redshirts or aim redshirts, its what's always dogshit about skrulls they are all just skrulls interchangeable and boring.

A nation consists of its laws. A nation does not consist of its situation at a given time. If an individual's morals are situational, then that individual is without morals. If a nation's laws are situational, that nation has no laws, and soon isn't a nation.
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HaemishM
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Reply #41 on: September 27, 2020, 10:14:01 AM

All the comic TV properties out there, especially the DC Arrowverse properties, have all suffered from too many episodes. Or more accurately, too many episodes in one long arc. It's been a problem with an easy solution and I'm not sure why the properties haven't taken advantage of it - most of the arcs are focused too much around a "one big bad behind everything" problem. Hoax is right about the lack of "Spiderman takes on Rocket Racer!" in this episode. Many of them have either shied away from monster of the week episodes because people complain about them or they've done them but only in service of the greater season arc. A 22-episode season should have 3-4 mini arcs with a major one at the end. The Netflix properties should have stopped at 10-episodes, maybe even 8-episode seasons. That tends to be the sweet spot for bingeable shows. The 22-episode season is an unfortunate artifact of network TV. Netflix doing 13-episode seasons seem to be mostly them trying to figure out what's best and overshooting.

Khaldun
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Reply #42 on: September 27, 2020, 11:29:40 AM

I think they also shied away from "enemy of the week" because they were all made on the cheap (hello, Perlmutter, you fucker). Even relatively cheap-ass villains with one-note gimmicks are more expensive to show on-screen and take more thought in terms of staging, etc.

But there really isn't any excuse for having superheroes with boring fight scenes because there are plenty of models for how to do more-or-less superheroic combat right where it's always exciting--you make the environment a challenge in its own right in some way (buildings on fire, need to not be seen or detected, need to prevent danger to civilians, need to protect specific objects or people, rooftops/bridges/heights, etc.), you create different kinds of emotional investments based on the scenes before (hero sad, hero happy, hero angry, hero doubting), you have the hero chased or being chased, etc. This is familiar stuff--if the showrunners and directors can't figure out how to make every scene of that kind have a payoff (or don't have the budget for it) better to just leave it be and not make the show.
MournelitheCalix
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Reply #43 on: September 30, 2020, 08:11:19 PM

I think they also shied away from "enemy of the week" because they were all made on the cheap (hello, Perlmutter, you fucker). Even relatively cheap-ass villains with one-note gimmicks are more expensive to show on-screen and take more thought in terms of staging, etc.

That was my problem with Daredevil as well as all the other season of the netflix marvel shows.  With the execption of Kilgrave and Kingpin in the first year of each show, I found the villans really terrible and uncompelling.   It was as if the writers forgot they had to write the villan to and it became simply directionless.

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Sky
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Reply #44 on: October 01, 2020, 08:52:20 AM

You didn't like Mahershala Ali (Cottonmouth) in Luke Cage? He was my favorite villain of the Netflix stuff.
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Reply #45 on: October 01, 2020, 09:27:30 AM

They probably should have ended it with him. Diamondback was awful (the actor that plays him just comes across as way too creepy, same deal with Boardwalk Empire).

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Khaldun
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Reply #46 on: October 01, 2020, 06:23:08 PM

The Netflix shows actually batted pretty well overall: Kilgrave and Kingpin are as good as anything the MCU has had to offer, if not better. Kilgrave is a quantum leap better than his comics inspiration, in fact. Cottonmouth was also pretty good.

MCU at this point has: Loki (great), Killmonger (great--there's something about the letter K, I guess?), Thanos (surprisingly good, given how cheese he is in the comics). Honorable mention: Nebula and Vulture. Maybe Hela, who is convincingly bad and has a touch of an actual reason for being bad.

At that point, the Netflix shows run out of anything worth talking about (still so depressing that the Defenders couldn't muster a villain that made that all pay off). But so does the MCU, really: Zemo is just a plot device made flesh, Ultron was a nice try but basically a failure, the Red Skull was kind of yeah I guess, Iron Man 1-3 didn't yield an actual villain of note but a villain deconstruction of note, both Ant-Man films have been like "good thing this is fun because the antagonists are just meh", and Mysterio was "sure, good twist".
Raguel
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Reply #47 on: October 04, 2020, 10:30:52 PM

They probably should have ended it with him. Diamondback was awful (the actor that plays him just comes across as way too creepy, same deal with Boardwalk Empire).


The quality of the show dropped like a rock after Ali was no longer in it.
eldaec
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Reply #48 on: October 05, 2020, 04:10:15 AM

Snake Plissken was also good as a villain. And Jessica Jones' mother.

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Threash
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Reply #49 on: October 05, 2020, 07:46:09 AM

The Netflix shows actually batted pretty well overall: Kilgrave and Kingpin are as good as anything the MCU has had to offer, if not better. Kilgrave is a quantum leap better than his comics inspiration, in fact. Cottonmouth was also pretty good.

MCU at this point has: Loki (great), Killmonger (great--there's something about the letter K, I guess?), Thanos (surprisingly good, given how cheese he is in the comics). Honorable mention: Nebula and Vulture. Maybe Hela, who is convincingly bad and has a touch of an actual reason for being bad.

At that point, the Netflix shows run out of anything worth talking about (still so depressing that the Defenders couldn't muster a villain that made that all pay off). But so does the MCU, really: Zemo is just a plot device made flesh, Ultron was a nice try but basically a failure, the Red Skull was kind of yeah I guess, Iron Man 1-3 didn't yield an actual villain of note but a villain deconstruction of note, both Ant-Man films have been like "good thing this is fun because the antagonists are just meh", and Mysterio was "sure, good twist".

Most of the MCU movies suffer from having to shoehorn a villain that just happens to have the same exact powers as the hero.

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Khaldun
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Reply #50 on: October 05, 2020, 08:02:46 AM

Old comics narratives have villains who are either driven by uncontrollable emotional or psychological forces, mostly some variant on pulp versions of mental illness and pathology, occasionally by something marginally more 'rational' like seeking vengeance for slights real and imagined, or they have operatic villains who want to conquer the world, more or less, again in a fairly pulp fashion.

Later comics narratives have taken the world conqueror types and have tried to either give them more ideological aspirations (Ra's al-Ghul being a really severe environmentalist, say) or to have them realize that maybe ruling the world overtly is a strange goal to have while also thinking in slightly more complicated ways about what world-ruling really looks like. (Doom is the best example of this: at least three times now he's succeeded in actually ruling the world and has had to admit to himself that it doesn't really satisfy him, partly because he's had to mind-control people to do it.) The villains driven by pathology are still around but sometimes are more complicated. What's been added are people who have a genuine reason to dislike the heroes or who are angry at being marginalized or treated poorly by society--righteous motivations, bad methods.  And people who are simply just looking for financial or personal gain with an indifference to whomever gets in the way.

It's harder to come up with that kind of antagonist in a two-hour film, esp. if you're trying to establish the protagonist(s) also, while also staying inside family-friendly lines that puts certain kinds of pathologies and violent sensibilities off limits. An awful lot of superhero films try to make it happen by folding the entire arc of the villain's story into the film and connecting the hero and villain's stories rather than have the villain have pre-existing motivations and have them just cross the hero's story. I think the MCU films need to begin to have a bit more of that--villains who have motivations that come from outside the hero's own story and situation and who happen to intersect with the hero through happenstance or through mutual interest in a situation or objective.
Sky
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Reply #51 on: October 06, 2020, 12:59:44 PM

Vulture
Michael Keaton NAILED it as the Vulture. Making him MJ's dad and interacting with Peter outside the whole hero/villain thing worked so well (I haven't seen Far From Home yet, Fox doesn't stream as nicely as Didny, though some has made it onto Didny+ now). Motivations as you say, and an actor who can dig into the role (and the effects folks to get the costumes right and cool). The scene where he figures out Parker is Spidey in the car is golden. I wanted more of Chapelle as the Shocker, he made a terrible old villain fresh and believable, if not deep.

I've always disliked Toomes and Homecoming made me love him (as a villain no homo).
jgsugden
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Reply #52 on: October 06, 2020, 02:31:08 PM

Vulture wasn't MJ's dad ... MJ wasn't his Homecoming date.

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Khaldun
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Reply #53 on: October 06, 2020, 04:13:29 PM

I understand the transposition, though--the character is in the MJ role. The actual MJ in the films is a really interesting hybrid of MJ and Gwen, really.

And yeah, the Vulture is a good reimagining--a guy with understandable resentments and a family motivation. They need a lot more of that for Spidey in particular, who fights street-level guys that he could potentially connect with or feel sympathy for.
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Reply #54 on: October 06, 2020, 05:05:38 PM

Liz Toomes is the daughter of Adrian Toomes, aka the "Vulture". She's also the one Peter asked to the dance. "MJ" is Michelle Jones, and yes that confused me too for a while since "MJ" is Mary Jane, not Michelle Jones, in my, and probably most people who grew up on the comic books and not the movies, Spider-Man head-canon.
jgsugden
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Reply #55 on: October 07, 2020, 10:04:21 AM

Liz Toomes is the daughter of Adrian Toomes, aka the "Vulture". She's also the one Peter asked to the dance. "MJ" is Michelle Jones, and yes that confused me too for a while since "MJ" is Mary Jane, not Michelle Jones, in my, and probably most people who grew up on the comic books and not the movies, Spider-Man head-canon.

...and may not end up being the MJ of the comics.  I think she may end up being our Gwen Stacey.  *Swik* *Snap*

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Sky
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Reply #56 on: October 07, 2020, 12:21:17 PM

Sheesh  why so serious?
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