WONDER WOMAN 1984 (2020): A Retraction

Back when WONDER WOMAN 1984 hit, I was in a bad place emotionally and I needed the comfort food of further adventures of my favorite Amazon warrior. I sat through the film and, while fully recognizing its many, many flaws, I still enjoyed it. But now it's months later and I have had a lot of time to mull it over while removing my comfort food need from the equation, and I finally have to admit that the film is a tragic over-long dumpster fire. The narrative is awful, they should have chosen one villain over the other and just focused on whichever they picked, Wonder Woman's barely in it in costume doing superhero stuff, and do NOT get me started on how the story turned Diana into a sex offender.

 

They've already greenlit the next installment and I hope they studio learned several lessons from the creative failure of this film. Patty Jenkins did a great job directing the first film, but she did not write its script. WONDER WOMAN 1984, however, was Jenkins's baby all the way, and if the results are anything to go by, she should not be let anywhere near a Wonder Woman script going forward. 

 

Seriously, when considering the roster of the DCEU movies, I place WONDER WOMAN 1984 only a notch above the Chernobyl that was SUICIDE SQUAD, and I do so purely for the major eye candy that is Gal Gadot.

BIRDS OF PREY AND THE FANTABULOUS EMANCIPATION OF ONE HARLEY QUINN (2020)

The return of Harley Quinn, and this time she's got a posse.

Four years after the cinematic debacle that was SUICIDE SQUAD (2016), finally fed up with being the Joker's physical and emotional punching bag, loony psychiatrist/gymnast/super-villain Harley Quinn (Margot Robbie) breaks up with the Clown Prince of Crime and once that fact is made public and she is no longer under his homicidal protection, everyone she ever wronged in Gotham City comes out of the woodwork to exact savage vengeance. Along with staying ahead of the legion of people who want to kill her, a distraught Harley is tasked by vicious mob boss Black Mask (Ewan McGregor) with finding a young pickpocket (Ella Jay Basco) who stole a diamond encrypted with the codes to unlock a long-lost mafia fortune. With only a few hours in which to accomplish her mission, Harley must navigate a maelstrom of underworld mayhem, and along the way she gains allies in hardened veteran Gotham City detective Renee Montoya (Rosie Perez), mob princess turned crossbow-wielding assassin the Huntress (Mary Elizabeth Winstead), and nightclubs singer with a hidden superhuman attribute, the Black Canary (Jurnee Smollett-Bell). Much fighting, shooting, and out-of-control mayhem ensues.

After purposefully avoiding it for just over a year, I finally sat through BIRDS OF PREY AND THE FANTABULOUS EMANCIPATION OF ONE HARLEY QUINN and, despite being utterly oversaturated with its lead character over the past two decades, I liked it quite a lot. In fact, I'd rank it among the best of the DCEU films. (Which is admittedly not saying much, as that bar is set frustratingly low.) 

Margot Robbie, one of the very few saving graces of the incoherent and genuinely awful SUICIDE SQUAD, is once more a lot of fun as Harley, and the whole film embraces the fact that it's basically a live-action cartoon. That said, I wish it had simply been allowed to be a Harley Quinn movie and not also serve as a cheap way to launch a possible Birds of Prey franchise. BoP is one of my favorite DC properties, especially when written well, and by tying it in with the antics of Harley Quinn in the minds of the general moviegoing public, the filmmakers have squandered any hope of a straight BoP movie.

Also, while I liked Jurnee Smollett-Bell in the role, I was kind of annoyed at the filmmakers making the Black Canary a black woman. I'm beyond sick of the trope of black superheroes automatically getting slapped with "Black" as part of their name (despite having written a parody black superhero named "the Black Darkness"), and part of the fun of the comics Black Canary is that she's a brunette white chick who dons a blonde wig when kicking criminal ass. At least this version kept the status as a second-generation legacy hero, following in her deceased mother's footsteps.

Ewan McGregor was also fun as crime boss Black Mask, who was clearly coded as gay and, refreshingly, not played as a fey stereotype. In fact, McGregor appeared to be having a blast playing this quriky and psychotic baddie. And speaking of criminals, his "BFF," Victor Zsasz (Chris Messina), is a real piece of work who reveals in the torture and mutilation of his victims. The scene where he peels the faces off of a Chinese crime boss, his wife, and his daughter is truly unsettling. And though based on a family-friendly DC Comics property, I was surprised to find out that the film is rated R and quite violent, which certainly kept me interested throughout.

Fun and definitely worth sitting through at least once. 

Poster from the theatrical release.
 

JUSTICE LEAGUE-The Snyder Cut (2021) or "Four Hours...For THIS???"

Because YOU demanded it: Extended dourness and turgidity.

 

Okay...

I mulled over my thoughts on the Snyder cut of JUSTICE LEAGUE for the past two days, and after sitting through its four-hour run time, I honestly have to ask myself why I even bothered. The immediate answers to that would be 1. So I could speak on it from a fully-informed POV, and 2. To see any new or extended footage involving Diana — yeah, I'm a total Wonder Woman mark — but it really was not worth the time expended. Yes, it's a more coherent piece than the theatrical version and it is very much the work of one director's vision, but an extended mess is still a mess, no matter how much you tart it up. Also, there was no way in hell that any American studio would release four hours of this to theaters and expect to turn a profit. Hell, they even balk at a feature that's just a bit longer than two hours, so four hours? Forget about it.

Yeah, it does flesh out the characters to a much greater degree, but when you have what's basically a pack of either boring non-entities or characters that the director fundamentally does not understand at all, such fleshing-out is about as effective as pissing into a hurricane. And though this version excises the jokey material that was clearly the work of Joss Whedon, what results is a dour, dark, and depressing effort that feel like a four-hour iteration of the Bataan Death March. DC and its stable of superhero characters have always been light fare, some would not unfairly describe them as "whitebread," and what Snyder gives us is an angsty emo kid's take on them. There is neither fun nor joy to be had here, and even the resurrection of Superman is accompanied by the black version of his uniform. As if the film's overall color palette were not already drab enough, we get comics culture's most iconic exemplar of raw power wielded with hope and kindness showing up like he's ready front for My Chemical Romance. At least Darkseid is actually in it (not that he does anything) and the visuals on Steppenwolf are considerably improved.

And speaking of Superman, following the events of BATMAN V SUPERMAN, the entire world knows that Superman was dead and, to a lesser/more localized degree, the same goes for noted Daily Planet reporter Clark Kent. In JUSTICE LEAGUE, when the heroes use a Mother Box to revive Supes, he returns in a confused and aggressive state — as seen in the theatrical version — and both Batman and Lois Lane call out to him as "Clark," and they do so in front of an assortment of police officers and military personnel, thus outing Clark to numerous witnesses. And once the story wraps up, Clark Kent is suddenly back from the dead at the same time as Superman and no one finds that odd?

There really are no spoilers for this version, as it's merely the theatrical excised of the Whedon material and taffy-pulled to a nigh-interminable duration. The post-apocalyptic vision of a world in which Superman has gone bad is also lengthened and it serves zero narrative purpose since a sequel to this will hopefully never happen. In that sequence Batman leads a team of Deathstroke, Mera — who's toting around a couple opf gallons of water in an otherwise arid landscape — and Jared Leto's horrendous take on the Joker, now seen with long hair, smudged lipstick, and spouting a whole lot of nonsense that will never be paid off. Oh, and we also get two brief scenes where the Martian Manhunter shows up, but he serves little or no purpose in the story other than to announce his presence and, while in the form of Martha Kent, get Lois off of her grieving ass and motivate her to return to work.

If none of this sounds compelling, it's because it isn't, and you are advised to spend four precious hours doing something, damned near anything else, other than sitting through this glacially-paced monument to the power of fandom and its ability to bully a studio into making you see the same garbage twice, only now with more garbage to pad it out. For completists only, and maybe not even then.

GODZILLA: KING OF THE MONSTERS (2019)

Much ado about nothing.

 

Well, I finally saw GODZILLA: KING OF THE MONSTERS (2019), and my life would have been in no way diminished if I had skipped it altogether. (I refused to pay to see it in the theater.) At least it got me through most of today's dialysis session.

I know that there are a lot of people out there who will cream their jeans over anything with the Godzilla name attached to it, and that audience was more than likely satisfied by this bloated, needlessly overlong, bland studio gewgaw that amounted to the cinematic equivalent of jangling dangled keys in front of an infant, and they are welcome to it. It's a CGI orgy and pretty much nothing more. The characters, if you can even call them that, did not engage me in the slightest, and that's really saying something when you consider that Charles Dance plays the antagonist. (The film tragically squanders his talents.) And though the characters in the Japanese run can largely be described as annoying, corny, or silly, at least they had personalities that made them memorable and entertaining. Also, they were fun. (Some prefect examples: Astronauts Glenn and Fuji, Miss Namikawa, and the polar opposite of silly, boring, and unmemorable, Dr. Serizawa.)

As for the monsters, I liked what they did with Mothra, and Rodan's battle with the Mexican air force was spectacular, but I didn't give a shit about either Godzilla nor King Ghidorah. It was like watching clones of dear old friends trying to pass themselves off as the real thing. You see, for me the Toho monsters just do not work when handled outside of their native culture and specific context. In the better films of his Japanese franchise, Godzilla was originally envisioned as the embodiment of the horror of the atomic bomb as commented upon by a people who experienced it firsthand — TWICE — and he was later retconned to be the living vengeance of those who died at Hiroshima and Nagasaki, which is extremely heavy stuff that lends the character true gravitas and terror. Removed from that context, all you have is a big lizard. Also gone is any trace of the personality displayed in the homegrown Godzilla films, and that personality, be it when he's an outright walking natural disaster or when he's something of a superhero, Godzilla had an identifiable character and swagger that is utterly absent in his American iteration, an aspect that I say stems from the American studio's fundamental lack of understanding of the character at his most basic. Sure, the special effects were among the best that money can buy, but they were in service of a dull, un-involving narrative that's as hollow as an ice cream cone minus a scoop.

Anyway, I'm glad that I had the good sense to avoid this during its theatrical run, as, to me, it would have been a waste of twenty bucks. It was every bit the empty corporate product that I expected, and now I fear the same may be the case with GODZILLA VS KONG. Thanks to how much I enjoyed KONG: SKULL ISLAND, I will see GODZILLA VS KONG, but the bar of my expectations is firmly set lower that a slug's ballsack. If it's actually good, I will totally support it, but if it sucks and it's boring, I'll bail on all further American Godzilla entries.

BATMAN: SOUL OF THE DRAGON (2021)

 

 (L-R) Richard Dragon, Batman, Lady Shiva, the Bronze Tiger. Sheer badassery.

A dear friend who's immersing himself into the DC animated movies strongly recommended that I check out BATMAN: SOUL OF THE DRAGON, and he was absolutely right. Its setting is the world of '70's-era kung fu and blaxploitation movies, or rather a blending of the two flavors, and it reimagines the Batman as one of several former students of a martial arts master who band together to take on an otherworldly evil. It's non-stop action from start to finish and it will all be quite familiar to those steeped in the films that it evokes.

The originally Caucasian Richard Dragon has been recast as Bruce Lee's ENTER THE DRAGON-style superspy, and it works like a charm. The Bronze Tiger is also present — voiced by Black Dynamite himself and real-life martial arts badass, Michael Jai White — and I'll be damned if his look is not meant to evoke '70's-era Luke Cage, which also works beautifully. Lady Shiva is her usual utterly deadly self (the story does not in any way shy away from her total willingness to kill), and the Batman in this story is definitely the Englehart-Rogers version, visually returning his look to that of his 1930's pre-Robin iteration (my favorite version, BTW). 

 

Batman, rockin' it old school.

BATMAN: SOUL OF THE DRAGON is a solid winner and it gets my HIGHEST RECOMMENDATION for those who are in on what it's laying down. The live-action Batman movies wish they were even 1/16 as good or as much fun as this 82-minute animated effort.

 

With these four united, the bad guys may as well dig their own graves and save the undertakers the trouble.

WONDER WOMAN 1984 (2020) Spoiler-free Review

Gal Gadot returns.

It's Christmas Day and WONDER WOMAN 1984 has dropped in selected theaters and simultaneously in theaters. Was is as good as director Patty Jenkins's inaugural entry in the series? Here are my thoughts on the matter, speaking as a lifelong Wonder Woman boster who was raised by a first-generation reader of the comics during the Golden Age:

• I enjoyed it but it certainly is not without flaws, chief of which is its unnecessary over-length. The same story could have been told with at least a half hour judiciously edited.

• Diana is seen in costume and superheroic action for less than fifteen percent of the film, so don't go in expecting what you got from her in JUSTICE LEAGUE. She's still a fun character though, and Gal Gadot manages to give her charm and personality, both aspects that, despite Diana's iconic status as a comics archetype and pop culture figure, she seldom possesses in most media. She's always been a great visual and symbol, but it takes someone special at the writing helm to make her more than just a distaff Heracles.

   

  

• I initially balked at the casting of Kristen Wiig as Barbara Minerva/the Cheetah, but she did a very good job with the role.

• Pedro Pascal's Maxwell Lord is every bit the on-the-nose Donald Trump analogue I expected, but he's also quite good.

• I could have done without the inclusion of Aristea's golden eagle armor, as it was quite nakedly included to provide a merchandising alternative to Diana's signature look. It has no charm or anything that really makes it visually interesting, but at least its screen time is short.

• The return of Steve Trevor actually makes sense and does turn out to be a major crux in the plot, so that gets a pass. The chemistry between Gadot and Pine works well and is more believable than many romances in superhero cinema.

• What museum keeps a stock of fully-fueled and operational aircraft? Also, ace pilot or not, there is no way Trevor would have been able to just sit down and suss out the controls on a fighter jet roughly 66 years more advanced than the prop planes of his era.   

   

  The inclusion of longtime DC Comics antagonist Simon Stagg (from the cast of Metamorpho) and mention of first generation Wonder Woman villain the Duke of Deception. The latter figures majorly into the overall plot, but he is never actually seen.

• The film features four action set pieces and all are fun, though I found the climactic set-to with the Cheetah to be somewhat of an anti-climax. To tell the truth, when really examined, her part in the story could easily have been left out, but the Cheetah os arguably Diana's Number One "Big Bad," so she kind of had to be in this film, I guess.

• One definite selling point is that though the story is set in 1984, the soundtrack does not take that as an excuse to bombard us with ’80’s pop music hits. In fact the only such usage I noticed was a snippet of Frankie Goes to Hollywood’s "Welcome to the Pleasuredome” during a party scene, and it wasn’t even one of the more obvious parts of the song. 

   

  Stick around for a fun mid-end credits bit that is guaranteed to bring a smile to the face of longtime Wonder Woman boosters.
  

Bottom Line: WONDER WOMAN 1984 is a fun flick and a better-than-average sequel that actually sticks to the themes of its character and what she's about at her core. It's too long for its own good, but it's paced briskly enough and does not fall flat at the ending like the first film did. (That said, the ending may come off as a tad less flashy and slam-bang as some might want, but I thought it fit Diana and her themes.)

Lastly, as a film for ending this utterly miserable garbage fire of a year, this film solidly delivers a much-needed dose of sunshine, kindness, and hope. B+

31 DAYS OF HORROR 2020-Day 31: JENNIFER'S BODY (2009)

When your supposed BFF just ain't right.

Our story is narrated by our protagonist,  nerdy-but-cute high-schooler Anita "Needy" Lesnicki (Amanda Seyfried), from behind the walls of a Minnesota women's mental institution, where she now resides as a violent inmate whose propensity for assaulting her fellow patients and the guards earns her frequent trips to solitary.

Needy has been best friends with Jennifer Check (Megan Fox) since their sandbox days, and one is hard-pressed to understand exactly why. Needy is a sweet girl but Jennifer, one of that breed of sexually-aggressive high school goddesses whose stunning beauty and smokin'-hot bod practically guaranteed she'd end up a cheerleader, could kindly be described as an alpha female "mean girl," and she lords her position and social status over all around her. Needy is no exception, but apparently their very one-sided friendship serves a purpose for the nerdette.

Jennifer: a self-proclaimed "great friend " and a truly horrid human being.

On a night when Needy had intended to spend some quality time with her boyfriend Chip (Johnny Simmons), Jennifer demands Needy's presence as her wing man, as she wants to go to a local club (actually a dive bar) so she can stalk the hunky lead singer of the indie emo band Low Shoulder. This is just the latest time that Jennifer has hijacked Needy, thus derailing Chip's plans, and the exchange between him and Jennifer makes it clear that there is no love lost between the two. Anyway, the underage girls get into the bar (which apparently does not check I.D.s at all) and Jennifer makes a beeline toward the band. She does not even attempt to hide her lady-boner for the singer, while Needy takes an instant dislike to him, considering him a "creep." While Jennifer hits the bar to get drinks for herself and her bestie, Needy overhears the band members discussing Jennifer and taking quite an interest in whether or not she's a virgin. Needy calls them out for that and attempts to keep an eye on the randy Jennifer, but a fire mysteriously breaks out, burning the bar to the ground while many innocent people, adults and the girls' classmates, are either immolated or crushed underneath the escaping panicked throng. The girls make their escape through the bathroom window, but the second they are outside the douchey singer takes the hand of a dazed Jennifer and tries to lure her into his bitchin' van. (I'm not certain but she acts likes she's either drunk or roofied.) Needy tries to convince Jennifer not to go with the band, but she's too smitten (and possibly wasted) to resist. As the singer leads her into the van, the singer smirks at Needy before slamming the door and driving off.

Needy, appalled at her friend ditching her for four strangers.

Understandably freaked-out by the carnage and also by Jennifer leaving with the band for god knows what fate, Needy calls Chip and tells him what happened. While on the phone with Chip, Needy hears an intruder downstairs, and she should be alone in the house because her mom is working the swing shift. The intruder turns out to be Jennifer, who's completely covered in blood and acting strange. She does not answer when the frantic Needy asks her what happened, instead raiding the fridge and devouring a roast chicken from the floor like an animal. She then does some EXORCIST-level projectile vomiting, only the spew is inky/jet-black, with unknown spiny objects within. Jennifer, in a display of inhuman strength, hoists the terrified Needy against the wall and begins sniffing around her neck like a vampire, but she backs off and departs, leaving a horrified and confused Needy to clean up the mess.

The following day, the girls' high school has become a place of communal mourning as the students come together over the loss of friends and family. A shell-shocked Needy is astounded to see Jennifer show up like nothing happened, and her callous disregard for the tragedy is the first clue Needy notices that tells her her bestie is not right. From there matters escalate, as Jennifer, who is now more alluring than usual, embarks on a killing spree, targeting various males among the student body. Things deteriorate between the girls as Needy, spurred by her best friend's negative traits coming to fore more aggressively, tries to distance herself from Jennifer and reflects on the nature of their long-term so-called friendship. But Jennifer will not leave her alone and, in a weird attempt at keeping the friendship going, she climbs through Needy's window and tries to seduce her. The two start to get hot and heavy but Needy snaps out of it and demands to know just what the hell is going on of late. Jennifer states that there should be no secrets between besties, so she makes with an origin story:

On the night of the fire and her abduction, the members of Low Shoulder drove Jennifer into the deep woods, where Jennifer quite understandably fears that she's about to be gang-raped. Such is not the case, however, as Low Shoulder intends to sacrifice her to dark powers in exchange for success and fame, because things are hard for a struggling indie band. Jennifer pleads for her life, suggesting that the band kidnap some other girl, "someone who knows how to do sex things," as she claims she knows nothing because she's a virgin. The truth of the matter is that she has been quite sexually active since junior high, but she's not gonna tell the band that. Psyched at having a self-proclaimed virgin in their clutches, the guys do their best to scare her, because fear further purifies the ritual, and they end up stabbing Jennifer to death with a Bowie knife. They leave her for dead and drive off to hoped-for success.

Jennifer further explains that she came back from the dead — she does not know the how or the why of it — and during the time since the ritual murder, she has discovered that she came back with a number of supernatural powers, such as inhuman strength, levitation, and a Wolverine-like healing factor that makes her damned near unkillable. The only hitch is that she must kill and consume human flesh, preferably male, once per month, or her inhuman looks and sexual allure will fade. Appalled, Needy kicks her out and the two begin to grow distant.

Needy puts her nerd skills to good use and researches exactly what happened to Jennifer, studying several books on the occult, witches, and dark rituals, and she concludes that the band botched the ritual by offering an "impure" sacrifice, so a case of demonic transference took place, allowing Jennifer to become a vessel for a murderous succubus. She also discovers that the only way to stop the succubus is to destroy her heart. What follows in the best teen dance horror movie finale since the original CARRIE (1976), as matters escalate, betrayal occurs, and Needy at last comes to terms with the true nature of her relationship with Jennifer. When all is said and done, Needy does what needs to be done, resulting in unexpected side-effects...

I skipped JENNIFER'S BODY when it came out, because it looked like just another shitty "teen" horror outing, starring two of my least favorite female leads, and also because it was universally lambasted upon release. I saw it for the first time yesterday and I am glad to say that it is a deeply misunderstood effort that is far more intelligent than the vox populi would have one believe, and both Fox and Seyfried are fantastic in their roles. Written by JUNO scribe Diablo Cody, the film displays some of the most believably-written and believable-sounding teenagers ever to grace the screen. I'm a guy who has always fit in better with my female friends, so I have seen and heard pretty much everything and seen all the ways that females interact since I was in high school, and Cody's examination of the specific inter-female dynamic seen here rings as very authentic, with Jennifer's demonic side being the sort of cunty inner beast that many high school hotties express, especially when dominating an easily-manipulated less-secure friend, only writ horrifyingly and homicidally large. Jennifer was always evil and a bad friend, but it took supernatural madness to wake Needy up to that fact.

I was going to review HEREDITARY as this year's final 31 DAYS OF HORROR entry, but I'd recently heard good things about JENNIFER'S BODY, so I gave it a chance. It's one of the best horror films of the early 2000's and is apparently finding the justice it deserves as it is reexamined and reappraised in a time that is more open to what it has to say. It was not helped by its studio focusing on Megan Fox's hotness and catering to her horny male fan base with the film's marketing, which made it look like another disposable and brainless teen horror flick, instead of the intelligent ultra-dark comedy that it actually is. Of this year's roster of 31 DAYS OF HORROR choices, this is one is my pick for the cream of the crop, an outstanding high school movie and equally superb as a demonic possession story, and I cannot recommend it enough. A must-see for all horror fans, both hardened grown-up "monster kids" and civilians alike.

Poster from the theatrical release. Talk about totally mis-marketing your film...

And with that, I bid all of you a safe and Happy Halloween 2020 in spite of the pandemic. If you can't go out, stay in and educate yourself on horror movies. And if you do go out, remember social distancing protocols and wear your mask! (By which I mean a face covering intended for use in the pandemic, ya sillies!) Thanks for reading CINE-MISCREANT and see y'all next year!