DC Movies- if at first you don't succeed...

[Cassandra]

On December 15, 2017 at 12:12 PM, Jagged said:

And the last Nolan Batman movie wasn't that great either.

 

Granted but it did have Anne Hathaway as Catwoman.

 

And no Ben Affleck.

[Christopher R Taylor]

Yeah Anne did a great Catwoman, best one on screen so far.  I kinda like Michelle Pfeiffer but the story was so bad her work was lost.

 

I especially liked how they worked the ears into her costume.  But i would have liked her to be more directly and intentionally catwoman.  I mean a guy dresses up like a huge bat and beats on people, is it so unreasonable a girl dresses like a cat, in today's culture?

[Lord Liaden]

 

[Jagged]

12 hours ago, Cassandra said:

 

Granted but it did have Anne Hathaway as Catwoman.

 

As much as I like the actress I thought she was miscast in that role. I didn't feel there was any chemistry with Bale either. Which is unusual for Bale anyway.

 

[Pattern Ghost]

1 hour ago, Jagged said:

As much as I like the actress I thought she was miscast in that role. I didn't feel there was any chemistry with Bale either. Which is unusual for Bale anyway.

 

 

I was sick of Bale by the third movie. I liked Hathaway and also Marion Cotillard.

 

 

 

[zslane]

So when Disney buys Warner Brothers, we'll finally get a decent DCU? Okay, who wants to help me put up the Kickstarter for that?

[bigdamnhero]

Hathaway was the only bright spot of that movie IMO. If only they hadn't muddled it by trying to cram in a second love story with Talia...

[Cassandra]

My next thread will be the Failure of Marvel Television.

[Lord Liaden]

I'm guessing you weren't on your school's cheerleading squad?

[Spence]

2 hours ago, Cassandra said:

My next thread will be the Failure of Marvel Television.

 

 

I was going to go "wait a minute" and then I realized all of the TV shows I like are DC. 

[Pariah]

The only major character I care about less than Batman is Squirrel Girl.

[Ragitsu]

I've become burned out on comic book movies. Studios continue to make them less "comic book" and more "real life interpretation of comic book".

[Christopher R Taylor]

I like Daredevil and Punisher, but the truth is, you could hack half of the shows out or more and have a better series.  Too much filler, too many shows basically about nothing.  But they're still better than Arrow or Flash or Supergirl.

[Old Man]

Don't knock Flash; it doesn't have the world's best writing or production values, but the kids love it. 

[Bazza]

5 minutes ago, Old Man said:

Don't knock Flash; it doesn't have the world's best writing or production values, but the kids love it. 

 

One thing Flash has going for it is optimism. 

[Jagged]

I love the Flash. I also love the Marvel shows. Agents in particular had a strong last season and the new one is looking interesting. Flash is light fun with a strong heart, what's not to love? 

 

These shows, DCU and Marvel, get a fair amount of complaint but I find them comparable or indeed better than much on telly today. 

 

Looking at my viewing habits at the moment and it's either Super heroes or history programmes. :-) 

[Ragitsu]

2 hours ago, Bazza said:

 

One thing Flash has going for it is optimism. 

 

Except for the fact that Barry Allen's new retconned motivation to fight crime is based around the death of his mother (whereas original Barry, for about half a century before, was heroic because he simply felt like making a positive difference), you are correct.

[Bazza]

How is Barry's motivation based on his mum, any different to Bruce donning the Batsuit due to his parent's murder? Pure altruism it is not. 

 

My comment is about the general tone of Flash, not solely limited to Barry's motivation to fight crime and other supervillains.

[Ragitsu]

That's Batman. That's his origin. Barry just wanted to do good because he felt that way. He didn't require a tragic backstory to go out and right wrongs. Now, he apparently needs a deceased (more specifically, murdered) parent to have some skin in the game.

 

Needless to say, I don't like this modern notion that A) Everyone/everything needs to become grittier, darker and edgier. and B ) A rough background is required in order to rise up and become a symbol of justice.

[Bazza]

I understand that you are drawing a distinction between the comics & tv incarnations. That is good. 

 

I only have the TV incarnation to comment on. So in many ways we are discussing as cross purposes. 

[Ternaugh]

The 1990s Flash TV show didn't need to kill off his mother for motivation, either. The production teams at Warner now seem stuck on trying to re-tell Flashpoint over and over, and it's getting really boring, frankly.

[zslane]

In my view, Marvel live action shows are superior to DC live action shows to the same degree that the MCU is superior to the DCEU. For DC, Wonder Woman and Supergirl are the shining lights of their respective domains. Everything else is pretty much garbage (though Arrow and Flash did not start that way). And even though shows like Agents of SHIELD and Agent Carter were perpetually ratings-challenged (after all, it's much tougher to shine on ABC than on the WB), they have enjoyed far better writing than is typical for the CW shows.

 

Now to be fair, DC has always earned praise for its animated tv shows. And even though animation is clearly where their strengths lie, I give them tremendous credit for trying to do live action superheroes on tv. I like and admire and that they've not shied away from the source material's most iconic tropes (costumes, superhero names, secret identities, etc.), but given the generally low caliber of their writing teams, maybe they should stick to cartoons where the audience is less demanding.

[Cassandra]

10 hours ago, Old Man said:

Don't knock Flash; it doesn't have the world's best writing or production values, but the kids love it. 

 

Of course his weakness is his repeating the same plots over and over and over again.  He may actually be stuck in a time loop.

[Cassandra]

2 minutes ago, zslane said:

In my view, Marvel live action shows are superior to DC live action shows to the same degree that the MCU is superior to the DCEU. For DC, Wonder Woman and Supergirl are the shining lights of their respective domains. Everything else is pretty much garbage (though Arrow and Flash did not start that way). And even though shows like Agents of SHIELD and Agent Carter were perpetually ratings-challenged (after all, it's much tougher to shine on ABC than on the WB), they have enjoyed far better writing than is typical for the CW shows.

 

Now to be fair, DC has always earned praise for its animated tv shows. And even though animation is clearly where their strengths lie, I give them tremendous credit for trying to do live action superheroes on tv. I like and admire and that they've not shied away from the source material's most iconic tropes (costumes, superhero names, secret identities, etc.), but given the generally low caliber of their writing teams, maybe they should stick to cartoons where the audience is less demanding.

 

Agents of SHIELD has literally become Lost in Space without Irwin Allen's fine grip on reality.  Want to know why they are trapped in a space station in the future?  Because Marvel is cheap.  They've locked the cast up in a huge warehouse so they don't have to spend any money on location shots.  The show started off as a spin off of The Avengers and now is recycling Star Trek The Next Generation holodeck scripts.  And Mac and Yoyo combined have all the charisma of Wesley Crusher.

 

I'm not going to defends Gotham with tries to be clever but is so grim I have to watch The Day After just to cheer myself up after watching it.  And Arrow has what Gary Trudeau called of Rolling Stone "An Elite Corps of Raving Idiots", no doubt chosen when a production assistant grabbed some bargain comic books when asked to research new characters for the show.

 

I will admit that DC's Legends of Tomorrow isn't very logically, but it's at least fun, and the characters are watchable.  Flash has built a nice little world for itself, even thought it's somewhat predictable.  

 

And then there is Supergirl.  Her weakness is wearing her heart on her sleeve, but these days that's as far as network television can go with characterization.  And she sings a little too much for my taste, but has a good cast and drops more easter eggs then the Easter Bunny flying a B-52.

 

Think I'm being too hard on Marvel.  I have two words for you.

 

The Inhumans.

 

 

[zslane]

Yeah, I agree that this last season of AoS has the reek of a slashed production budget. But I think they're doing a pretty fine job given those constraints. The CW shows generally do a better job of squeezing production value out of a shoestring budget, but it is evident that none of that money goes towards hiring decent writers, which is a critical problem in my view.

 

Yes, I think you're being too hard on Marvel (and Supergirl, shame on you). But you are definitely not being too hard on The Inhumans. Nor would you be unfairly harsh by calling Iron Fist a steaming pile as well. However, I think the overall high quality of Marvel's live action efforts so vastly overshadows their occasional failures, that it is unfair to pretend like those failures define Marvel on television.