slikmar

Possibly the best cosplay of the year--

"I want $10 million a year for the rest of my life."
 
"Let me get this straight. You think that your client, one of the wealthiest, most powerful men in the world is secretly a vigilante who spends his nights beating criminals to a pulp with his bare hands, and your plan is to blackmail this person? Good luck." 

I think that's pretty true about almost all of DC (and much of Marvel too at this point).   Consider just Wonder Woman who keeps being rebooted and remade and reimagined etc.  In my mind Perez did the best with her in the 80s but it wasn't that long after he left the title they rebooted her again.  Its the curse of fans wanting continuity while wanting things to be fresh and liking big events.

Heresy!  Next you'll suggest DC can't have its cake and eat it too.   

I refer too my comment on the biggest problems with DC's "reboots". Not just trying to restart but trying to keep the history of each character too. Seriously, if they would either do the legacy thing OR clean slate reboot, would be so much better.
Just saw Aquaman, I liked it and thought as good as first. Loved the homage to Mos Eisley and Jabba. Not a fan of the casting of Shin, or at least the portrayal.

If they'd stopped at the one major reboot that changed him from what he'd been since 1945 (ie a failed prototype who let his hubris lead him to abuse his powers, acting as a dark mirror of Captain Marvel) I could see the point.  But they didn't.  Once they started seriously tampering with him they never stopped, and at this point he's been through so many creative teams and ill-considered revamps that he no longer has a reason to exist and his stories are so incoherent and meandering they aren't worth reading.  He's been an antihero, then a villain, then supposedly seeking redemption without any of it lasting so many times now it's laughable.  Too many cooks have pissed in the Black Adam stew to salvage the character, at least not without a long cooldown time and probably yet another reboot that sticks this time.
 
Seriously, just look at this mess, and keep in mind that is just an abbreviated synopsis on wiki.

As far as making money goes, I think that we can't underestimate the "It's going to be on my streaming in 6 weeks" crowd. I know quite a few people who have this attitude.

I'd watch that
 

Saw Wonka today.
 
I enjoyed it. Was the Gene Wilder Wonka, younger, meets Annie and was fun and whimsical in front of a Londonish type of town. For those who liked Wilder's version, it is recommended, if you preferred Depp's, probably not for you.

The problem with Black Adam, and I actually was fine with the movie and enjoyed the JS as you did, is that Adam isn't a hero. He is Doom, effectively, in the DC universe, which this movie was sort of setting up. He is a master villain who is a leader of a country, and therefore has a certain amount of immunity.

I had some significant issues with the Black Adam movie, but I loved the Justice Society. Vivid characters, great chemistry between them, impressive powers and action scenes. IMHO a movie based around them would have been much more interesting and entertaining than what we got.

Found this awesome post on Facebook, dunno the author to give credit.  Bold emphasis mine
 
Who is the best Marvel movie or TV Marvel villain? Hands down, David Tennant's Kilgrave from Jessica Jones' first season, the perfect embodiment of sexual and domestic violence. He's one of those rare villains who leaves you with unease long after you turn off the TV, and it's because he was there before you turned it on. He's not the best villain because of his personality, though his glee and charm is a large part of it. He's not the best villain because of the scope of his villainy. He's not out to destroy any cities or conquer any galaxies. He's not even out to take down a hero, although that's what he's going to do along the way. You see, Kilgrave's power is this: You have to do anything he wants you to do. Anything at all. Maybe he wants your jacket. Maybe he wants you to have sex with him. Maybe he wants you to become his lover and live with him happily, forever and ever, in a lovely little house for the two of you. Maybe he wants you to murder your mom. You know those intrusive thoughts, the ones you would never in a million years do, the ones that make you wonder if you're a monster? The ones that say, jump over the railing. Hold the match to your sleeve. The dog sure looks happy; why don't you kick its brains in? Kilgrave whispers the very worst things to you, and you do them. Kilgrave makes it your fault when he does what he does to you. Makes it your idea. Does it with your hands. Makes your body something bad. And he makes the people you depend upon blame you for it. So when Kilgrave uses his powers on you, you aren't a victim. You are a villain. And you're utterly, eternally alone in your hurt and your horror. And it doesn't end when it ends. He's got no master plan or secret agenda. He's just following his whims. If he decides he really likes you, he'll bring the trauma back over. And over. And over. He can leave an idea in your head that never goes away, an idea that sits there where you can't see it until it suddenly shows up at the worst possible moment. Creating a villain who generates such revulsion and horror in the audience is like capturing lightning in a bottle. As Dorothy Sayers told us, it’s almost impossible to write the Devil without making the audience root for him, because those attributes that make a villain an opponent worthy of writing about are virtues, or are at least the personality traits that make a character fascinating. If your villain isn’t powerful, you’ve got no story. If your villain isn’t talented, you’ve got no story. If your villain isn’t persistent, isn’t charismatic, doesn’t have a good reason to do what they do . . . no story. There is a sense in which it's very hard for us to tell honest stories about evil, because real evil isn't extremely watchable. So instead of making legitimately evil villains, we make villains who are heroes on the wrong side, or villains who are heroes with a streak of malice, or we just take the hero, run through a list of their strengths, and come up with a foil for each bullet point. Those methods make engaging villains. Those are the villains you love to see, because they thrill you at the same time that they horrify you: the Darth Vaders and the Hannibal Lectors, the Moriartys and the Lex Luthors. Those bad guys may not have our allegiance, but they have our attention, our fascination, the stamp of the viewer's approval. But to write a villain who elicits horror in the audience, who’s a perfect counterpoint to all the hero’s strengths, and to have the audience feel sick when he’s on the screen—that’s extraordinary. And in this case, it’s achieved by tapping into a kind of violence that has only rarely been addressed on the screen, and even more rarely shown from the victim’s point of view. It’s not the “violent rape” that politicians discuss, the kind that grabs you in an alleyway with a stranger’s hands. It’s the kind that gets up close and personal in all the other ways, in ways that nobody can see from the outside. And its perpetrator is an emotional toddler, raging for anything and everything they want, right now, as if their whims were as essential as oxygen. There is absolutely nothing appealing about Kilgrave. Zilch. Even his charm isn't directed toward us; it's directed toward the other characters, the ones Jessica needs to believe her and help her, and so we hate his charm. He convinces the audience that he’s powerful, maybe too powerful to be defeated, and we’re right there in Jessica’s misery with her, feeling isolated and despairing. Kilgrave's comic-book villain in Jessica Jones does what speculative fiction does best: turns a mirror on reality. You can make a villain who is stronger than other villains, who rules a bigger empire or has a bigger weapon or is out to kill more people than any other villain ever written. But all you're doing is playing the game of "Oh, yeah? My bad guy is bad times a hundred. No; times a million. Times infinity plus one." Kilgrave tells us what bad really is, and it rings true. Anybody who's had to take out an order of protection knows Kilgrave already. Anybody who's undergone a rape kit knows Kilgrave already. He's the rarest sort of screen villain: the one we were afraid of before he was written.

I thought you were gonna say they were Roman lions, playing in the Colosseum.....
 
EDIT:  on another note.......did we just forget about past offensive offsides calls in the past, and now, after the Toney play, they're sticking in our heads?  There have been...gosh, I dunno, 4 or 5 since then?  Another brought back a Prescott scramble for a red zone first down...  OH...I see.  Illegal shift cuz the receiver backed off after lining up wrong...that's motion...when another player was in motion.  OK, that's not common, but it's something we've seen forever, the WR backing off....

Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny: It's a serviceable story built around the search for the other half of the antikythera mechanism, and has a heap of nostalgia for the older films. Runtime of 154 minutes is a bit long, and some scenes drag. Overall, I liked it, and thought that it made a good final movie in the series. (4K UHD Blu-ray; also available on Disney+)

There was not anything to explain.  The idea that the super soldier formula slowed aging was never introduced into the MCU.

More like Snyder is re-doing "Battle Beyond The Stars" and "Message From Space"--both of which, to my mind can be made better, could be, in my opinion, "Fixed."  I'm not sure that Snyder is the one to do it, however.
 
I can't fault him for trying, though.  George Lucas himself wanted to make his own Flash Gordon movie after "American Graffiti" but couldn't get the rights--so he made his own "Flash Gordon," with robots and magic samurai and space smugglers and space princesses.  I don't know about you, but I think it worked out really well for him.

If you do, try to read them in order - I believe most of them are in three-novel compilations these days, and there's always the used market.  There is quite a bit of character continuity as the series advances through the years, and jumping into one of the more recent books will leave a new reader pretty confused as to some of what's going on.  Garrett himself has changed a lot, and his long roster of girlfriends has done a lot of that changing.  Imagine a mix of Spade and Archie Goodwin if he wasn't frozen in amber.

Count me as another in favor of the Lord Darcy books. And I am a huge fan of noir detective style, so will look into the Garrett stuff, thanks Rich.

I enjoyed the "Lord Darcy" stories and am glad to learn that another author continued them -- and did it well, which is flipping amazing.
 
Yeah, I know Dunsany influenced Smith and Lovecraft; I've been fans of theirs for ages. But somehow I'd never gotten around to reading much Dunsany even though I knew perfectly well he was a majpor influence.
 
I've never seen Lords of Creation, but Pegana somewhat influenced early development of White Wolf's Exalted in some of its treatment of gods and demons. Its model for gods shifted to be more Chinese Celestial Bureaucracy, but I think a few stylistic aspects remained. (And Games of Divinity owe their origin to Dunsany as a phrase, if not what they actually were.) The most persistent influence probably came with Exalted's demons and their world of Malfeas -- likely because that was mostly the creation of R. Sean Borgstrom, a.k.a. Jenna Moran, who is one of the very few game writers I can think of with the mental and stylistic chops to achieve a Dunsanian style.
 
Dean Shomshak

If you enjoy the "magical detection" subgenre and haven't already done so, I'd recommend taking a look at Randall Garrett's Lord Darcy stories, which got a big compilation a while back that's probably in the library system by now.  Stylistically they're a bit Sherlockian, if Holmes was more lot personable and Watson was a magical forensic expert.  Michael Kurland wrote a few sequel novels after Garrett died, which are also worth a look - they're almost flawless pastiches of his style, something you don't see very often.
 
Or if you want a more "pulp noir" take on the subgenre, there's the lengthy series of Garrett, P.I. (no relation to Garrett) novels by Glen Cook, starting with Sweet Silver Blues way back when.  They're generally much lighter reading than his Dread Empire or Black Company work, but as a fantasy mashup of Nero Wolfe and Sam Spade tropes pretty good.