I can occasionally be a classy lady

[trinityvixen]

It's Friday. I so rarely get the weekend itch, but today I have it. I stayed up all of half an hour later than my usual last night, and I'm paying for it today. I almost called in sick because that's how alluring my bed was. Now that I'm at work, I'm going through my tissues like mad because something's in the air. I should probably go get some

Comments

[chuckro]

Well, at least I feel less bad about my inability to see any of the big superhero movies this summer. Apparently they all suck before they even hit theaters or anyone has seen them.

[trinityvixen]

They don't all suck. Thor was fun, and it introduced some magic into Marvel's otherwise decidedly science-oriented fiction, which is an interesting line to walk. X-Men: First Class is flawed, but not fatally so. Honestly, given that I keep trying to work out reactions to it, it must be doing something really right. Captain America may suck, but it will still have Hugo Weaving as the Red Skull, so I cannot even be arsed to care about quality.

That just leaves Green Lantern. Way to drop the ball, WB. I held out hope that I would be wrong about that through at least the first two trailers. No longer.

[chuckro]

It's really just as well comics are dying. Sooner or later I will forget that I ever liked them, and stop caring if the movies are good or not.

[trinityvixen]

Aww, no one wants that. Is this bitterness long-standing or is it in response to the latest DC reboot thing?

[chuckro]

Meh, a reboot is a reboot. It'll look just like the Silver Age, it'll pull in decades of continuity even if it isn't supposed to, and it'll only last until they come up with something else.

No, this is a generalized frustration that the characters and stories that I actually loved will never get made into good movies, and aren't even going to feature in comics any more. Kyle is Green Latern--he's a schmoe chosen at random in a world full of gods and he rises to the challenge. Wally is the Flash--he's a former sidekick smacked by real life and growing with bumps and bruises along the way. Except that the DC creative team is stuck in 1970, where Hal and Barry had no personalities beyond being unlucky with their only girlfriends, and that's always what we'll fall back to.

Oh, and in the battle of Marvel vs. DC, Marvel always wins. Because apparently DC characters are so iconic, no one on any creative team can fucking agree how to write them.

[chuckro]

Oh, and the fact that an X-Men movie can always pleasantly surprise you, but Green Lantern? Sucks before anyone has seen it. I hear there's a new Batman movie in the works: Does that suck yet? Or do we need to see posters first?

[trinityvixen]

X-Men movies don't always pleasantly surprise you. The last two, excluding First Class were dreadful. Whereas I was all set to like Green Lantern until I saw the trailer for it. There's so much potential there, given that Green Lantern is a hero character (characters, I should say) not especially widely known and could be crazy inventive. I think Kyle Rayner's movie would have been really cool, and very Marvel-esque, in him just being the guy the ring came to by luck who makes good. Hell, even straight-arrow John Stewart could have been awesome (and helped to alleviate the race!fail of this glut of superhero movies we're now enjoying).

They had a real chance to prove that the DC universe can be more than just the binary of Batman-Superman, and they totally blew it. Will we even get to a Flash movie? Or Wonder Woman? Why can't they get their act together?

[trinityvixen]

Oh, and in the battle of Marvel vs. DC, Marvel always wins. Because apparently DC characters are so iconic, no one on any creative team can fucking agree how to write them.

I think you, in what seems to be a fit of either cynicism or pissiness (hard to read over the internet) about my generalizations, have actually come closer than I have to nailing this down. I think you're exactly right. I generalized again about DC heroes being too perfect, but that's how they seem to one on the outside, whose interaction with them is mostly through the decidedly innocent and frequently shallow medium of TV. Whatever their actual characterization, DC characters are too iconic to adapt a lot of the time. You either do it like Donner did, or Nolan, or you give up.

It's kind of funny, then, that the most successful of the adapted works has been Smallville, for a given definition of successful. But the show was on for ten years, and it was definitely different, although they did make Clark Kent out to be some annoyingly perfect being a lot of the

[ivy03]

X-Men First Class is worth a viewing, even if you won't be appreciating it for the same reasons as me. :) And the fail in that movie is more of the race!fail type than story fail.

[chuckro]

Jethrien gave me the racefail rant when she got home from seeing it. I'm sure I will find a chance to see it when it comes out on whatever format follows bluray, sometime in the coming decade...