Arguably the Rocky movies too
DC Movies - To Infinity and Beyond
- Thread starter dahj
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Of course not. The point is not to pick a winning "side" in a falsely binary definition of the question, but to understand the objective truth with all its nuances and gray areas. That requires a willingness to be honest about every side of a question.
The problem with popular jokes and parodies is that there are always going to be people who are more familiar with the parody than the reality and will mistakenly assume the parody is the reality. Like how people think President Gerald Ford was a klutz because of Saturday Night Live's parody of him, when he was actually a former athlete. Similarly, I've seen at least one person on this very board assume that William Shatner's "Get a life" sketch from SNL was something he said at a real convention.
Similarly, I guess there are people who don't get that the whole point of the "Superman is a Dick" parody site was to take the covers depicting his seemingly awful behavior out of context, without the explanations for it in the actual stories, so that he seemed worse than he was.
Which is exactly the problem. Decades of comics creators for DC and elsewhere (as far back as the late '80s and '90s, long before anyone grew up with them) have missed the point that those stories were meant to be extreme deconstructions of superhero stories, not the default template for how they should be told. There's no point to a deconstruction if there isn't an existing construct for it to provide a contrast to.
Huh???? James Bond, an optimistic hero???????? Okay, maybe Moore's version of the character was more cartoonish and less dark than the character as originally conceived, but he was still defined as a killer by profession and nature and a casual user of women. If anything, he was closer to the violent macho heroes of '80s sword-and-sorcery movies like Conan the Barbarian and Deathstalker.
Really, I'd say that Luke and Superman were unusually upbeat heroes for 1970s science fiction films, since that was a decade where SF movies were generally more dystopian or dark, things like Invasion of the Body Snatchers, Logan's Run, or Capricorn One. In trying to think of similarly optimistic film protagonists, I can only think of movies that came out after Star Wars and Superman, like Time after Time, Starman, and Back to the Future.
Even in its day, Superman: The Movie was seen as an exercise in nostalgia, a throwback to the clean-cut heroes of an earlier, simpler time. And Star Wars has always been blatantly about nostalgia for the things George Lucas loved as a child. So neither one was typical of it era.
Right, their ratings were so low that Arrow lasted 8 seasons, The Flash lasted 9, Supergirl lasted 6, Legends of Tomorrow lasted 7, Black Lightning lasted 4, and Batwoman lasted 3. Obviously, they were all massive failures that nobody watched.
Your denial has no bearing on reality; the Arrowverse series were consistently low rated--that is an easily researched fact--and the majority were of inferior quality, hence the general perception that any comparison to the Berlanti series is a comment about low quality work, and the negative view of the Batgirl[/] film--also compared to a Berlanti's DC shows.
Agreed.
Superman--once he realizes his true heritage--is an alien trying to relate to humans, but he's not getting lost in the crowd as a perfectly blended / integrated "human". That is his struggle--because he knows his Kryptonian view of life is not naturally aligned with John and Jane Average , so he has to work to find his balance / relation to a species that would not readily embrace his alien way or even the idea of a creature with overwhelming power. IOW, his nature guides him more than the nurturing of the Kents. Yes, some of the endless re-tellings of the origin have leaned in on the nurture side, but the better adaptations & stories featured a Superman who had to find his way.
Few are asking for a "Golly Gee Wilikers" or the dreaded Santa/Daddy Superman in this age.
Anyone using MCU Captain America--the Rogers version--as a template or inspiration for Superman need to remember that he evolved over the course of his appearances. The Winter Soldier forced him to see reality as is, rather than what some might want it to be, and he was never above forcing his will on individuals, a situation, or organization (e.g., his decision to destroy S.H.I.E.L.D. as well as Hydra, breaking his friends out of prison, threatening to fight the government if it stood in his way, etc.). That's not the pollyanna-esque view of the world, but adapting to its methods and using them as he sees fit. The Rogers Cap lost most of his naive views during the war (as one would expect) and he was a better character for losing those views.
I don't think it's as simple as antiheroes = super duper cool. We like characters like Dexter, Hannibal, Joel Goldberg because they're charismatic individuals. Same with Steve Rogers and Captain Kirk. You can do a Superman who embodies a strong sense of justice and kindness without resorting to a "golly gee, kids, drugs are bad" pastiche. Just make him a likable individual who's got a strong screen presence, and we'll want to root for him and what he stands for.
Indeed. Surely Tyler Hoechlin has proven that abundantly. Honestly, so did Henry Cavill. I always liked him in the role even though I disliked the stories he was saddled with.
Frank Grillo has joined "Creatures and Commandos"
https://twitter.com/i/web/status/1626978800943628289
https://twitter.com/i/web/status/1626978800943628289
As written, he was also an extreme racist--even for the time of publication. Censored novels were published in the U.S. to remove the more extreme racist elements.
I didn't know that. Was that from Fleming's own attitudes, or did Fleming choose to make Bond racist as a character flaw?
I don't have the definitive answer to that. Many try to defend him by saying he was a British man of his time when a sense of British superiority over people from the "colonies" was widely accepted. But the depths by which Bond goes into dissecting the reasons for why Blacks, Asians, Eastern Europeans, and Gays are flawed and inferior shows that Fleming at least thought deeply about all of that. Because of the movies, this is widely overlooked, but some of the passages in the books are unreadable because they are so offensive.
He's not. The Snyder fanboys are just unhappy to loose their brooding Superman.
Or that he was aware of such attitudes and opinions from others around him (they would've been pervasive and hard to avoid) and used them in building his character. From what I've read, Fleming didn't intend Bond to be at all heroic or even likeable.
You're right on that--he is a cold blooded killer. My personal opinion is that Fleming was a man of his time. A lot of people of my grandparents era had a lot of similar attitudes. I remember a lot of generalizations about groups of people that somehow did not apply to people from those groups who were their friends. That was just "how things were" 60 to 70 years ago for many people.
Oh, do I ever hate that movie…with the heat of a million suns.
Well, yes and no. While there were many people who unquestioningly accepted the attitudes of their times, there were always people who were more progressive than the norm and believed in greater equality, such as comedian Jack Benny and director Jacques Tourneur in the 1930s-40s. And there were others who eagerly embraced the bigotries of their time and were worse than the norm, like H.P Lovecraft. So it's not just a matter of the average attitudes of the day, it's a matter of individual choice to embrace or challenge them. It's one thing to excuse someone in the past for being behind today's attitudes. Even the most progressive attitudes of a few decades ago would be regressive today, since standards have evolved so quickly. It's another when they were no better than the average for their time, or worse than the average.
It has at least one redeeming feature, its Jerry Goldsmith score. Otherwise, I can't disagree.
I'm perfectly fine with them both being in their 30s.
The MCU and Star Wars both say hi. Those are two billion dollar franchises with the majority of their movies being pure escapism with classic non dark good vs evil stories. Movies and television are two entirely different beasts which is why your examples are so flawed. As much I enjoyed the last Batman movie, it's box office was no where near as big as the last Spiderman movie. As much as I enjoyed some elemants of the snyderverse, his darker vision of Superman and the DCU was incredibly flawed and the numbers bear this out. If the people really want this darker and grim movies then DC would have crushed Marvel and Zack Snyder would still be in charge. Clearly the majority of people who pay to see movies are looking for an escape from reality and want to leave a movie theater with a smile on their faces.
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Ah, but some insist that Superman must be that "Golly Gee Wilikers" or the Santa/Daddy model of the Weisinger era of comics or OMG! he's like The Punisher and all hope spirals into a pit of darkness. An extremist leap to be sure. Times do tend change the individual--including fictional characters, but it does not mean the character leans toward one extreme or another, but reflects natural changes with the environment around him.
For example, the Golden Age Captain America would not work when revived in 1964 being that single-minded, wartime message-oriented character. The second Lee, et al., turned him not only into a man out of time, dealing with PTSD (regarding Bucky's death), but soon made him question the legitimacy of a blonde-haired, blue-eyed man dressed in the U.S. flag in a grim, racially divided nation (remember, this happened only a few years after the revival, which became an oft-visited theme of CA comics), he stopped being the saluting, jingoistic near-caricature, transformed into a compelling, relevant character who fought to make his walking symbolism live up to the intent as never before. That was a successful maturation process reflecting the similarly changing world, which audiences related to, rather than Cap--and Superman--being some fixed-in-stone idea from a bygone era few are trying to resurrect.
