2018: The Year of the Spider

So this year we had two of the Spider-Man franchise’s most successful offerings, in the forms of a video game and an animated movie.

Into the Spider-Verse is a funny, trippy, visual delight.  It’s probably my favorite Spider-Man movie to date.  The animation is amazing, with a comic book style that never stops being impressive.  The characters from the different universe have their own animation styles as well, making things even crazier.  The writing is hilarious – I wasn’t expecting the movie to be so funny, and for me that was going the extra mile.  This movie would have sold well based on the visuals alone, but they put in the effort to give it a good script.  It’s also very self-aware.  At one point my wife pointed out an overused trope during the movie, only for the movie’s characters to point it out as well five minutes later.

The Spider-Man video game is equally impressive.  There’s not much I can add to the hundreds of glowing reviews out there, but I still want to give it its due praise.  The graphics are beautiful, the controls are intuitive (for the most part), and the overall sense of freedom is one of the best things I’ve experienced since GTA3.  Between missions I love just swinging around the city at different times of day, seeing what sort of trouble I can get into.  I always wanted to play something with the feel of a GTA game, but where you’re the good guy.  To be fair, some of the previous Spider-Man games used a similar template, but this one’s execution is nearly flawless.  Okay, so there are a few special moves that make me feel like I need extra fingers, but that’s a tiny quibble against an otherwise wonderful game.

It's especially funny to me because both the movie and the game were produced by Sony.  After the MCU’s “Homecoming” blew Sony’s “Amazing” series out of the water, it seemed like Spidey was at his best when kept in Marvel’s loving hands.  It almost feels like this is Sony’s way of saying, “We can do better, just give us another chance!”  Granted, they also gave us Venom this year, so they haven’t totally figured out what works and what doesn’t.  But at least there’s hope, now, that more quality Sony offerings are on the way.

All right, Sony, make with the Spider-Gwen movies and games!

Life is Strange and the Evolution of Electronic Storytelling

I played a lot of adventure games as a kid.  At first this usually meant text adventures, where you type “Go North” or “Get Sword” to progress.  Some had graphics, but some of the best ones didn’t.  I still have fond memories of trying to acquire the Babel Fish in “Hitchhiker’s Guide To The Galaxy”, or figuring out the spoonerisms in “Nord And Bert Couldn’t Make Head or Tail Of It”, neither of which had any graphics. 

But typing is tedious, and I’m a visual person, so I gradually got tired of these.  Later I played the LucasArts games “Maniac Mansion” and “Zak McKracken and the Alien Mindbenders” on my C64.  These used a point-and-click interface where you constructed sentences by clicking words and objects.  It was an easy, intuitive interface and the games had a great sense of humor.  I remember wishing there were more games in the series, but sadly, “Day of the Tentacle” didn’t come out for the C64. 

I didn’t play any real “storytelling” games for a long time after that.  After college I got into role-playing games.  I love RPGs, but no matter how much story they put into them, you still spend a lot of time grinding levels and buying equipment.  Sometimes it’s nice to play a game where you don’t have to worry about combat, like an interactive movie where you just make decisions.  

I've played a bunch of visual novels, but I’m starting to lose interest in them.  They require a lot of time to read, and honestly, it’s hard to find ones written well enough to be worth that kind of time.  At this point if I’m going to take the time to read a book, I’d rather  just use my Kindle.

I’ve skipped a few storytelling games I’d probably like, just for lack of time.  There are several from TellTale games that sound interesting to me, like Jurassic Park and Guardians of the Galaxy.  I tried the GotG demo, it seems pretty cool.  I might come back to these.

Recently, I started playing “Life is Strange”, along with the prequel, “LiS: Before the Storm”.  Life is Strange is a few years old now, but then I’m usually a few years behind everyone else when it comes to playing new games.  Heck, I could probably start a blog dedicated solely to modern retrogaming, given the frequency with which I'm late to the party.

As of this writing, I’m only about a chapter into each LiS game.  I should probably have finished one before starting the other, but I’m weird that way.  Unfortunately the ending of LiS has already been spoiled for me, but I’m still looking forward to it.  And no, I haven’t yet decided what I’m going to pick for the final sadistic choice, but… and let’s keep this spoiler free… I will probably abide by one of Spock’s most famous quotes, painful as it may be. 

I have to say I’m impressed with both games.  The visual interface is simple and stylish.  When you approach an object that can be interacted with, words pop up (with a charming handwritten font) that show which button does what.  The menu screens have a scrapbook theme that fits the story.  The stories are compelling and I like the characters.  You’re presented with a lot of difficult choices, and for a wishy-washy person like myself, making an important decision can be just as tough as a Ninja Gaiden boss.

Graphics have improved in the four years since LiS was released, but I’m still impressed by the artistry of these games.  They make great use of camera angles, landscapes, body language, music, and other nuances that give the story a cinematic feel.  There’s something to be said for any game where I can tell what my character is thinking by the way they’re standing.

The main character in LiS has the ability to rewind time, which not only allows you to undo bad events, it also lets you master the art of conversation.  Accidentally insult someone?  Rewind time.  Find out someone’s secret interest?  Rewind time so they don’t remember telling you, then suggest the interest yourself.  It reminds me a bit of Groundhog Day, when Phil tries to gain Rita’s affections by memorizing her favorite things.  “Before the Storm” doesn’t have this supernatural element, and instead introduces a “Backtalk” system where you can “win” conversations by choosing the most appropriate insults in the context of a conversation.  It’s hard to say which I like better. 

I can tell you I prefer controlling the protagonist of LiS to that of BtS.  Max (LiS) is a photographer, a pastime I can relate to.  Meanwhile, BtS’s Chloe is kind of a jerk (to be fair, her life sucks), and her main artistic talent is snarky graffiti.  I have a hard time making decisions as Chloe, because I can never decide if I should do what I would do in real life, or if I should stay true to her character.  I couldn’t pass up the opportunity to play D&D though, even though it didn’t seem like her style.  Playing a tabletop RPG within a video game was awesome. 

A while back on my other blog, I posted about the lesbian romance novels I’ve been reading lately.  This was possibly my favorite aspect of the LiS games.  I’ll always cheer for any positive LGBT representation in a video game, and the LiS games seriously get it right. 

Yes, some people do complain about the over representation of LGBT characters in video games today.  It seems like every time you turn around, there’s another LGBT character.  Some bigoted critics even accuse the game industry of “shoving it in our faces”.  But I think of it as catching up.  I’ve been playing video games since the late 70s.  If you look at the biggest games from 2014-2018, it may seem like there’s a higher-than-statistically-likely percentage of LGBT characters (okay, I don’t really see it, but some do).  But if you expand your range to 1978-2018, the percentage of LGBT characters is unrealistically low.  Given time, this supposedly unrealistic influx will settle down and even out.  But the truth is, these critics aren’t actually interested in realism; some of them think even one LGBT character is too much. 

Okay, to be fair, in a lot of old games you don’t really know your character’s sexual orientation, and sometimes not even your gender.  It’s not like “Pong” has a deep backstory.  But once games did have recognizable characters, the protagonist was usually male, and they were often tasked with rescuing a female, which establishes some definite cishet gender roles.  

As I’ve mentioned before, my favorite games are the ones where you can create your own characters, or at least choose your sex.  If there’s a romance option where you can choose your sexual orientation, so much the better.  In Dragon Age, for example, I always played a female character and romanced women.  I would have done the same in Mass Effect if I’d ever gotten around to playing it.  The Life is Strange games may not let you create your own characters, but they do a good job of giving you a character I would have created for myself.

Both are excellent games so far, and I highly recommend them.  I'll try to post another blog when I finish them, with a more complete analysis.  They make me really with I had more free time.

“Life is Strange 2” is currently coming out.  It’s being released episodically (as were the others), and as of this writing only one episode is out.  I don’t know if I’ll be as interested.  The main characters are male, and anyone who knows me knows that I’m 50% more likely to buy a game if there’s a female protagonist.  That percentage is even higher if I can play as a lesbian.  On the other hand, I hear LiS2 has some excellent social commentary that would appeal to a raging SJW like myself, so I may still check it out.  I will wait until all the episodes are out, though.  I hate owning incomplete games.

Book: To Stand Beneath The Sun

To Stand Beneath The Sun
By Brad Strickland

After spending a long space flight in suspended animation, colonist Tom Perion’s pod is ejected and he lands in the ocean.  He is rescued by a ship with an all-female crew.  He soon learns that women outnumber men on this planet 8 to 1.  In a society that resembles pre-industrial Earth, women do all the work and have all the power, while men are treated like pets.  From that alone, it sounds like the set-up for an erotic novel.  Instead, this is a well-written sci-fi drama.

The book has a major revelation about twenty pages in.  I won't spell it out here, but it's every bit as impactful as “the Planet of the Apes is really Earth”.  It feels like it's breaking a sci-fi rule to have this type of twist so early.  I can’t help but wonder if Strickland originally wanted that revelation to be closer to the end, only to discover he had more story to tell after the reveal than before it.

It’s a well-constructed world for a one-off novel, and I wouldn’t mind using the setting for an RPG.  The author goes into great detail about the society, the animals, the plants, and so on, but manages to spread it out so you aren’t presented with one huge boring infodump.  A lot of sci-fi authors try to make things alien by just making them weird, but Strickland actually thinks the ecology through, even putting thought into this planet’s evolutionary ladder.  A good rule of writing is to know way more about the setting than you actually put in the story.  In this case I yearn to know what was left on the cutting room floor.  I would love a complete sourcebook about this planet.

This book was published in the 80s, but to me the style feels more like the 60s/70s, when speculative fiction was actually speculative.  Don’t get me wrong, I love the cheesy 80s and modern sci-fi.  But let’s face it, the genre has lost its sense of wonder, and is now just drama that happens to be set in the space.  Sometimes it’s fun to read a story that actually does its homework, especially if it’s written as well as this one.

Excellent book, well worth the read.

Infinity War and Musings on Fictional Death

While it's obvious that the victims of Infinity War's "Snapture" will come back, there's a lot of speculation about the other deaths in the movie.  Mainly Loki, Heimdall, Vision, and Gamora.  Some people are saying, "They better not bring any of these characters back, or those gut-wrenching scenes in Infinity War will lose their impact."

I'm not saying they're wrong, but here's the thing.  I've been reading comics for most of my life, and even wrote my own back in high school.  And there's something I've noticed about comic book death, and it's a rule so important it deserves to be in bold:

The cheesiness of a fictional resurrection is directly related to whether or not the resurrection was already planned when the the character died.

The best writers will plant subtle clues about the character's return, sometimes before the character even actually dies.  You often feel stupid later when you go back and discover these clues.

I'm not saying it's a universal rule.  A good writer can bring back an old character in interesting ways, and a bad writer can make a planned resurrection look like an ass-pull.  But in most cases, I believe the rule holds true.

Some examples:

Loki "dies" in Thor: The Dark World.  He shows up again at the end of the movie, though, like we all knew he would.  Not cheesy in the slightest.

In Highlander II: The Quickening, MacLeod resurrects Ramirez by shouting his name during a quickening.  The writers of the first Highlander movie probably had no intention of ever resurrecting Ramirez (or making them aliens, or having a sequel at all, really), and this comes off as very cheesy.

When Superman died in the comics in the 90s, they'd already planned his resurrection.  His return was long and convoluted, but honestly no cheesier than the Superman comics typically were already.

When Jason Todd (the second Robin) was killed by the Joker, he was meant to stay dead.  Years later he was revived as a side effect of Superboy Prime punching a hole in the universe... or something.  Do I have to tell you that's cheesy?  The animated version had him brought back by Ra's al Ghul's Lazurus pit, which isn't much better.  Todd became a popular character after that, so I'm not saying it was a bad decision... but the actual resurrection itself was pretty cheesy.

A quick and easy rule for movies: If a character shows up by the end of the same movie in which they supposedly died, it's not as cheesy.  Infinity War parts 1 & 2 (or whatever part 2 is finally called) are basically one long movie.  They were written at the same time, partly filmed at the same time, and whatever resurrections happen in part 2 were already planned when the characters died.

I'm not saying Vision or Gamora will come back, I'm just saying don't dread the possibility, you bloodthirsty miscreant.  If they come back, it will be an important part of an already planned-out story.

Beach Buggy Racing

Sometimes you pay $60 for a game, and play it for a week.  Sometimes you pay $5 for a game, and play it for years.

Beach Buggy Racing is basically a discount Mario Kart.  In fact, I'd say it's the closest thing to Mario Kart the PS4 has.  It costs $10, but it goes on sale a lot.  I got it for under $5 during one of the Playstation sales.  My wife and I have been playing it every night for months.  It's one of those games that we just don't get tired of.

It only has 15 tracks, and a small selection of characters and vehicles.  But it's just so much fun!  It was a tablet game before it came to the consoles, which is usually a recipe for disaster.  But somehow it manages to get everything right.  It controls well, has a ton of weapons, and a fair amount of depth.  The tracks are creative and full of shortcuts.

My biggest complaint is that I want more content.  More tracks, more characters, more vehicles.  If they were to release DLC, I would buy it.  I don't think that will happen, though, because they are working on a sequel.  I will say that when the sequel hits the PS4, I will buy it immediately.

If you like kart racers, buy this one immediately.  It's worth it.

Injustice 2, Mortal Kombat X, and My Dream Fighting Games

I'm a little late to the party here - both of these games have been out for a long time now.  But after how much I loved the original Injustice: Gods Among Us, I had to post something about Injustice 2, if only to complain about the gear system.

But let's start with Mortal Kombat X.  It's more of the same, but it's impressive how it takes advantage of the newer consoles to realistically render gore.  The fatalities are absolutely sick now, and much more organic looking than the static fatalities in the older games.  Brains and hearts and tongues now look like separately-rendered objects, and they look fantastic.  Some of the fatalities and X-ray moves are very clever; I especially like Cassie Cage's "selfie" fatality.

I love the guest stars - the DLC characters from horror movies.  Jason, Leatherface, Alien, and Predator are excellent additions, though I miss Freddy Krueger from MK9.  It would have been nice to be able to pit Jason vs Freddy.  And so it occurs to me that what I really wish they'd do is an all-horror game.  I'd rather have that than an MK11, really.

My Dream Horror Fighting Game:

1. Start with the MKX engine, including fatalities, X-ray moves, and so on.

2. Use every horror guest star they've used before: Freddy, Jason, Leatherface, Alien, and Predator.

3. Get the rights to every additional horror movie villain they can get, like Michael Myers, Chucky and Pinhead.  Don't forget classics like Dracula, the Wolfman, and the Mummy.

4. Add a few horror heroes like Ash Williams, Buffy Summers, or Ellen Ripley.  Maybe even some meta icons like Elvira or the Cryptkeeper.

5. Design a few original monsters to fill out the roster, and have a couple of MK characters be the DLC guest stars this time.

6. Skins, skins, skins!  Original and reboot versions of each famous villain.  There's probably a dozen versions of Jason they could tap for inspiration. 

I would play the hell out of that.  Okay, so getting all those rights could make the game cost more than it's worth, I don't know.  MK is owned by Warner Bros, so that should give them access to a couple of them.


Now, about Injustice 2...

I love the graphics.  I love some of the new characters, especially Supergirl.  The multiverse events are kind of neat, much better than the first one's STAR Labs crap.  Beyond that, I liked the first Injustice better.  The difference?  Skins and levels.

They released a ton of skins for Injustice 1.  Neat stuff like a TV-inspired Arrow, classic Harley Quinn, Killing Joke Joker, anime-inspired Catwoman, and so on.  Injustice 2 has a few "Premium Skins", but not nearly enough.  Instead they concentrated on the new gear system.

At first, the gear system sounds really cool.  You get gear from winning matches and earning virtual "blind boxes" from multiverse events.  This gear alters both your appearance and your stats.  You can use these to create custom characters.  It's fun to mix and match different heads, torsos, legs, and other parts to create unique looks for your favorite heroes.  You can even change the colors.

The problem, of course, is that the gear changes your stats.  So you're probably just going to use gear with the best stats, which keeps you from having the look you want.  If you have a favorite piece of cool-looking gear and want to give it better stats, there is a way to do that, but it costs in-game resources.

Wearing powerful gear and leveling up your character only makes sense for the single player mode.  If you're playing against another human, you're going to want the game to be as fair as possible.  The basic versus mode gives players unfair advantages over each other, by letting level 30 characters fight level 1 characters, and letting you choose powerful gear loadouts.

This is a fighting game!  It's a genre that usually puts a lot of stress on balance.  Most fighting games put hundreds of hours into their playtesting just to keep any characters from being more powerful than the others.  These games are constantly updated for balance purposes, and certain characters are banned from tournaments for being too powerful.  Injustice 2 throws that concept out the window.

The good news there's a "Tournament" mode, which is a versus mode that keeps things even.  The down side is that you can't use your gear loadouts, even for cosmetic purposes (I think there's a way around this by adding match rules, but it's a hassle).  You can use the Premium Skins in the Tournment mode, but again there aren't very many of them.  I tend to play the same characters a lot, so I'm a big fan of skins to break up the monotony.

So the biggest problems I have with Injustice 2 could be fixed with a few minor updates.  Unfortunately they're done updating Injustice 2, and they're probably already working on MK11.  But Injustice 2 is so close to being the perfect fighting game for me, it drives me crazy that it fell short.

My Dream DC Fighting Game:

1. Start with Injustice 2.

2. Make more premium skins.  The Injustice 2 mobile app has tons of cool skins in it, and if all they did was import all of those, I would be satisfied.  Importing the ones from Injustice 1 would be cool too.  I would also like it if Green Lantern had more GL Corps members as skins. 

3. Make the default Versus Mode more like the tournament mode, in that all characters are the same level.  Let us still use gear loadouts, but make them cosmetic only.  The current Versus Mode can still be there as an option, but the default should be the most balanced version.  That's what Versus Modes are for.

4. Bring in some (if not all) of the missing characters from Injustice 1, specifically Hawkgirl, Zatana, Batgirl, and Lobo.  I like it when a fighting game makes the older games in the series obsolete.  Some of the later Street Fighter and Mortal Kombat games did a great job in making sure they included nearly every character from the previous games.

That's really about it.  Basically, if you could just combine Injustice 1, 2, and the mobile app into a single game, it would be a few tweaks away from being my all-time favorite fighting game.  In its current form, it's just okay.

Jurassic World: Fallen Kingdom

My standards for Jurassic Park movies are pretty low.  I know none of them are ever going to match the majesty of the original, and that's fine.  At this point, I'm mostly into them to see dinosaurs eat people. I like each of the series, even the bad ones, for different reasons.  But Fallen Kingdom is hard to love.

My biggest complaint is the large amount of animal cruelty.  Take all the "capture and torture dinosaurs" scenes from The Lost World, but stretch it out for half the movie, and you have my problems with Fallen Kingdom.  As an animal lover, these scenes are not fun for me, I don't care if they're CGI.

The JP series is full of shallow characters, but Fallen Kingdom's characters are particularly paper thin.  Honestly, my favorite character in the movie is Blue the raptor.  Her performance was much more believable than that of the human actors.  

Most of the JP movies have straddled the lines between action, drama, and horror, but this one in particular felt like a horror movie (if relatively bloodless).  The new dino in this one was definitely the scariest dino in the series.  It felt like a significant tone shift in a series that usually feels somewhat family friendly. 

That means that I don't really feel comfortable holding it to the benchmark set by the original Jurassic Park.  It feels more appropriate to compare Fallen Kingdom to movies like Halloween or Friday the 13th.  It's not as gory, but it fits right in IMO.

There's a plot twist toward the end that feels completely pointless, unless it's a set-up for future movies (which may not even happen given this one's reviews).  In fact, the entire ending felt like it was putting something big into motion.  There's several loose threads, and future sequel writers have a couple of strong options for the direction it takes.

The problem is, I'm no longer sure I care. 

...Eh, who am I kidding, as long as there's people getting eaten by dinosaurs, I'm probably in.

Ant-Man & The Wasp & Introspection Illusion

This past weekend we saw Ant-Man and the Wasp.  Fun movie!  It goes about where you think it would, not a lot of big surprises, but it has a funny script and lots of eye candy.  The writers put a lot of work into finding creative applications for the shrink/grow powers.

Really, though… If I was to actually write out a list all the things I liked and disliked about the movie, I think the list of bad things would be longer the good.  It’s a bit shallow, there’s a lot of Deus Ex Machina, and it tends to handwave a lot of the hard-to-swallow details. 

It also had one too many villains.   The FBI and the supervillain were enough of a threat to carry the movie, but the writers decided to add a silly black market tech dealer to pad the movie’s runtime.  But my biggest complaint is probably the abundance of spoilers in the trailers.  I can’t tell you how many times they’d do a cool shot and I’d think, “That was awesome, I wish I hadn’t already seen it in the previews.”

But you know what?  I still love the movie.  It’s flawed, but fun.  On paper it almost looks like a failure, but the film is more than the sum of its parts.  Some people won’t like Ant Man & The Wasp, and if you ask them why, they’ll list everything I said above.   So why do those flaws add up to a bomb to them, while I can look past the movie’s shallowness and have a good time?

I have a theory that people actually have no idea why they dislike things.  You watch a movie and hate it on a subconscious emotional level, but your brain won't accept "I hate it because I hate it", and has to fill in the logical reasons you feel that way.

For example, I know someone who hates the sitcom Friends.  Her reason?  “Everyone is always so mean to each other!”  I’ve never actually noticed that about Friends, but I suppose it’s there if you really look for it.  Snarky comebacks are a big part of the humor, though I’ve never seen it as mean; if anything it’s part of the bond that holds the group together.

But here’s the thing – this same friend likes several other shows where the main characters are flat-out jerks, all the time.  So that’s a big part of my theory:  Whatever someone tells you they don’t like about a movie/show/book/etc, you can find examples of media they enjoy that contain those elements.

Her real reason for disliking Friends?  Probably the show simply isn't in sync with her sense of humor.  Humor is far from universal, and everyone has a unique funny bone.  If Friends made her laugh, she'd like it.  Not laughing gives her more time to notice the show's flaws.  Her brain won't accept the vague "it's just not for me", so it gave her the flimsy excuse she uses.

Now, if I’ve learned one thing in life, it’s that you can’t talk people into liking things, any more than you can talk them into liking a food.  You can shoot down all their complaints one by one, doing extensive research to prove why the plot holes they found weren't really plot holes, but it won't help.  So I’m not posting this to convince anyone to watch shows they know they don’t like.  I’m just pointing out your reasons for not liking it may not be what you think they are.

I used to know a couple who hated anything mainstream.  Their logic was that most people are stupid, so if most people like something, it must be stupid.  Except… some things really do become popular because they deserve to.  And what if you see a sneak preview of a movie, before it has time to be popular?  Do you have to wait until the box office results are in before you decide if you liked it?

I had one friend who hated Forrest Gump because she didn’t like the ending – she wasn’t sure Forrest was capable of taking care of a child by himself.  Even if I shared her concern, that’s only a reason to hate the ending, not the entire movie.  Surely, while watching the movie in the theater, she’d already decided whether or not she liked the movie by that point.  If she'd had an emergency and had to walk out before Jenny died (um, spoiler alert I guess), would she have felt differently about the movie?  I doubt it.

Titanic gets a lot of haters because it was so overhyped.  As I’ve said before, that may be an excuse to hate the advertising department, but don’t take it out on the movie itself.  I’m not saying I’ve never been annoyed by hype (See Ant-Man & the Wasp above), but I do try to keep a movie and its marketing as separate entities in my mind.

One thing I’ve heard people say about both Friends and Big Bang Theory – “They don’t talk or act like real people!”  This one sets me off for a couple of reasons.  First off, nobody in Star Wars talks like real people either, that’s why it’s fiction.  I can’t remember the last time I went to Toshi Station to pick up some power converters.  Behaving like real people is not a requirement in fiction, in fact, making dialogue too realistic makes shows hard to watch.  Real people clear their throats, start sentences and change their mind, use the wrong word, stutter, and display all kinds of verbal tics that would make me change the channel.

That said, the characters on Friends and BBT remind me more of my real life friends than the people on most sitcoms.  Maybe you’re just hanging out with the wrong people.  Chandler Bing’s snarkiness is practically the foundation of my marriage.  And BBT characters actually make specific references to current media, while other sitcoms seem to be vaguely aware that Star Wars might have had robots in it or something.  Yes, these characters sometimes do unrealistically dumb things to move the plot forward, but the alternative is a plot that never moves forward.

I do it too.  If I were to give you a list of things I hated about Batman & Robin, it would probably include things like Batgirl not being Commissioner Gordon's daughter, or Bane being a mindless henchmen instead of a criminal mastermind.  But to be honest, I probably would have ignored both of those details if they had occurred in a better movie.  Would I whine because the Joker wasn't chemically bleached in The Dark Knight?  Of course not, so obviously messing with comic book continuity alone doesn't make a bad movie.

I could even go on to mention the flashiness of B&R, and how it wasn't as dark and broody as the other Batman movies, how it hyped up the cheesiness and had a lot of bad acting and silly dialogue... but a lot of these problems were present in Batman Forever, which I loved.  A lot of the goofier points of B&R were an homage to the 60s TV series, which I also loved.  Is the world no longer ready for a humorous Batman?  Well, that "Brave and the Bold" cartoon series was pretty popular, so that's not it.

I know one guy who hated 2012 because he thought he saw a plot hole.  He was wrong, and I explained it to him... he still hates it, but at least now he hates it for the right reasons.  But plot holes shouldn't be dealbreakers anyway.  There are some pretty popular movies with well-publicized plot holes.  Citizen Kane, My Cousin Vinny, Ocean's 11... and yet people still love them.  But they see one continuity error in a bland movie, and suddenly that's the sole reason it sucks.  

And some people simply go into a movie with the wrong expectations.  I know one guy who hated Revenge of the Sith because it didn't explain the existence of the evil cave on Dagobah.  That's like the very definition of "I hate it because they didn't make the exact movie I would have made."  I knew a woman who hated "There's Something About Mary" because... and I quote... "They never did explain what it was about Mary."  ...You can't argue with that.

Typical fanboy review:
That movie was terrible, it wasn't enough like the book/comic/cartoon, the director didn't use any of my ideas, and anyone who liked it is an idiot.  That one scene where they showed the watch on his left wrist, then when the camera angle changed it was on his right, just ruined the entire movie for me.  Doesn't the director even read my blog?  Why can't they make a serious movie about a guy who shoots cufflinks out of his ears?  I felt like the director wasn't taking it seriously.  Has the director even read this comic?  Issue #193 clearly states that Captain Cufflink is allergic to shellfish, and yet they show him eating lobster?

A couple of those might be genuine concerns, but the truth is that you would accept all of those issues if a good movie was wrapped around it.  There are some legitimately bad movies out there, ones that earned their 0% rating on RottenTomatoes.  But the movies that are well-liked, that just don't click with you?  It's okay that you don't like them, I just wonder if you really know why.

Infinity War (Spoilers)

If you read this without having seen Infinity War, I will personally whack you with a rubber fish.

When I first came out of Infinity War, I felt like I’d seen half a movie.  I hate cliffhangers.  They make me nervous. What if the world ends before part 2 comes out?  Never mind all the death and suffering, an unfinished Marvel series would be the real tragedy. 

But after a while I started to feel pretty good about it.  You just have to think of Thanos as the protagonist.  He gets some backstory, he has a quest, he experiences personal growth, and finally he wins the conflict.  It helps that he actually believes he’s right.  It’s not like he’s taking over the universe just because he craves power or money.  He truly believes that by wishing half the universe into the cornfield, he’s making life better for the other half.  If you buy into his version of morality, the movie is almost uplifting.

Okay, so he’s not the first Well-Intentioned Extremist to appear in a comic book movie, but most of the others are focused on their own group.  Magneto, for example, wants to make a better world for mutants, but doesn’t care how many non-mutants have to die to make it happen.  But Thanos wants to make things better for everyone, and if half have to die for that to happen, he’s at least merciful about it. 

Infinity War had a lot of funny dialogue and some great action scenes.  On the other hand, it was so heavy-handed (giant metal gauntlets will do that) that I don’t know if I’m going to want to watch it over and over like I do some Marvel movies.  In addition to hating cliffhangers, I also don’t like sequels that undo the happy endings of other movies.  The Guardians of the Galaxy spent their first movie saving the planet Xandar, only to have it devastated off-screen in Infinity War.  Ragnarock’s bittersweet ending is also much more of a tragedy now.

Overall it’s a great movie, but “great” can also mean “large or immense.”  It feels like a gut punch, but it’s a solid story.  I might feel better about it after I see Part 2.  So, what’s going to happen in Part 2?  We already know that everyone who faded away at the end will come back.  Some of them already have sequels in the works, so it’s not much of a surprise that the whole “wiped from existence” thing will be undone.  That may have been the cheesiest part of Infinity War; they might have been smarter to only show characters getting dissolved who don’t have sequel plans.  The actual fading away took far too long, but I think they wanted us to take note of which characters are alive and dead.

Cheatsheet (thank you Wikipedia):

Alive and kicking: Thor, Tony Stark, Nebula, Bruce Banner, Okoye, Rhodey, Rocket Racoon, Steve Rogers, Black Widow, M'Baku.

Dead before the end: Loki, Heimdall, other Asgardians, Gamora, Vision.

Banished from Existence: Bucky, Black Panther, Groot, Scarlet Witch, Falcon, Mantis, Drax, Peter Quill, Doctor Strange, Spider-Man.

Is Loki permanently dead?  I’d say it depends on whether there’s ever a Thor 4.  He’s the easiest one to bring back, since he fakes his death all the time.  But if they never make another Thor movie, then he’s probably dead in this continuity.  For that matter, how many of the other Asgardians survived?  Thor says Thanos "killed half his crew", so which ones did Thanos capture as slaves before blowing up their ship?  If Thor can survive a spaceship explosion, followed by floating through the vacuum space, can’t some of the other Asgardians as well? 

Is Gamora permanently dead?  This one is more complicated to me.  I think she’s a great character and the GotG series will be duller without her.  But at the same time, I think future Marvel movies will lose some of their impact if she’s magically brought back.  Like, what’s the point of even mourning for a character any more, if no one stays dead?  Still, I feel like there’s some clues that make her death iffy.  The way Thanos dropped her – after everything we’ve seen Gamora survive, I’m not even sure if a fall from that height would kill her. 

If the writers really wanted us to know she’s dead for good, they should have had something at the bottom of the drop, like spikes or lava.  To me, keeping her body intact seems like a writing trick – the writers may need that body later.  Her death led to obtaining the Soul Gem.  Maybe that means the gem contains Gamora’s soul.  What happens if that soul gets back to her body?  And the scene at the end where Thanos seems to retreat into the Soul Gem after Thor whacks him... what was that all about?

Is Vision permanently dead?  Well, was he ever really alive?  I love Paul Bettany and would hate to see him leave the series, but it’s hard for me to feel too bad for Vision.  He never really had enough screen time to make me care about him, and the character was so incredibly bland.  He also may be too powerful to use much, like how in Justice League cartoons they’re always sending Superman on deep space missions to keep him from defeating the villain-of-the-week too quickly.  I’m less worried about whether Vision lives than I am about how many tragedies they throw at Scarlet Witch.  If they keep killing off her loved ones, she’s going to be a supervillain again.

How are they going to fix everything?  I don’t know.  There’s probably clues in who didn’t disappear.  When Doctor Strange decided to give the Time Gem to Thanos in order to save Stark, we’re meant to think it was the standard “heroes always show weakness to save other lives” trope, but I don’t think so.  Strange knew that Thanos would kill far more people with the gem than without it.  When he looked into the future, he said he saw a million ways this plays out, and we only win one of them.  To me this means that the only future in which we win, is one where Stark survives.  Stark could still die later in Part 2, but only after he saves the day.

And why did Infinity War go out of its way to show us where the gauntlet was forged?  That seems like a clue as well.  And how will Captain Marvel factor into this?  Her insignia is the last thing we see in Infinity War, and her movie comes out shortly before Infinity War Part 2.  Is her movie going to be more like Infinity War 1.5? (Update: I have since learned that Captain Marvel takes place in the 90s.)

So many questions, so long to wait.  

Who Would Win?

A few years ago I was reading a thread on some message board.  The subject: Could Superman beat the Hulk?  

Of course, hundreds of Hulk fanboys cited their evidence, while Superman lovers brought up their facts.  At least two canon examples were presented of Superman actually beating the Hulk, but the Hulk fans dismissed those issues for whatever reasons.

I think one problem comes from the fact that Hulk fanboys just picture them trading punches until one falls down.  This turns it into a simple mathematical problem.  Who hits harder?  Who can take the most punches?  But it doesn't work like that.  Superman's had his share of fistfights, but he uses his mind as least as often as he uses his fists.  He constantly faces villains stronger than himself, otherwise his comics would be boring.  If he can't beat them with his fists, he beats them with his wits.

So while a strict boxing match could go either way, an actual comic battle might end up with Superman grabbing the Hulk and flying off into space somewhere.  Or building walls around him at super speed.  Or sucking all the oxygen out of the room.  Or zipping off to the Fortress of Solitude and returning with a Kryptonian device that disperses gamma rays.

The question wasn't "Could Superman beat the Hulk in a straight fist fight where no one flies or does anything clever?"  It wasn't "Could the version of the Hulk in 1997 beat the version of Superman from 1983?"  It wasn't "Would Superman absolutely always beat the Hulk in every possible scenario?"  It was a simple, straight, "Could Superman beat the Hulk", a question which was answered with the first actual example from the comics.

Superman obviously can beat the Hulk, since he has.  "Oh, the Marvel vs DC fight doesn't count because that was a version of the Hulk that gets weaker when he's angry."  Sorry, nope, you didn't put that in the question.  There are always going to be external factors.

The Batman ones are especially funny, because the first question asked is always, "Does he have prep time?"  Batman doesn't need prep time, he's been planning for every possibly fight for decades.  One of his defining traits is that he's always ridiculously prepped.  If the Hulk ever showed up to fight Batman, Batman would already have  plan for it.  Despite existing in different universes, Batman probably keeps an anti-Hulk weapon tucked away in his utility belt.

So I hate to burst your bubble, but here is the answer to every "Who Would Win" question:

Any fictional character can beat any other fictional character if the story is written that way.

There ya go.  If Jar Jar Binks can take out a battle tank by tripping over things, then Superman can beat the Hulk.  If Squirrel Girl can beat Galactus, then Superman can beat the Hulk. If Jeff Goldblum can defeat an alien armada by using a computer virus, then Superman can beat the Hulk.

'Nuff said.

Star Wars: The Last Jedi (Spoilers Aplenty)

Because some movies deserve two blogs.  I already did a spoiler-free blog about the Last Jedi, but I also wanted to post a few more specific thoughts.  Only read this post if you've already seen the movie.

DANGER: SPOILERS

I realize that cute characters are a Star Wars staple - Jawas, Ewoks, Gungans, mouse droids, and even R2-D2.  They inevitably annoy some adults, but those adults need to come to terms with the fact that Star Wars isn't solely for them.  Now that Disney's involved, I wouldn't be surprised if the number of cute critters increases exponentially.  BB-8 manages to be even cuter than R2, and the porgs are were obviously invented to be marketable.

But you know what?  The porgs aren't nearly as annoying I thought they would be.  Yes, they are completely irrelevant to the plot, and literally only exist to make the audience laugh.  Even Jar Jar moved the plot forward, but porgs are just superfluous eye candy.   But on the bright side, they don't get too much screen time, and they never wear out their welcome like the Gungans did.  And some of their scenes are truly hilarious.

BB-8 on the other hand... I still love the little guy, but he's way overpowered in this movie.  There's a scene where he single handedly takes out several guards, and another where he saves the day by piloting an AT-ST.  I don't know why they even recruit resistance fighters any more, they would be better off building an army of BB droids.

The plot is weird.  A large portion of the movie involves the First Order slowly chasing a resistance freighter that only has shields in the back, waiting for it to run out of fuel.  I've seen multiple reviewers ask: Why they don't just send a few ships ahead of it to shoot it from every side?  The movie sort of answers this question, but not very well.

Meanwhile, during the slow motion chase, Finn and Rose manage to fly off in a smaller ship to look for a hacker in a casino.  It's a very weird sidequest.  "Hey we're going to fly away from the main plot for a while and come back."  If it's so easy to just fly away in a ship like that, wouldn't that have been a better escape plan than the incredibly slow moving escape pods they eventually use?

How many people could Finn's ship hold, anyway?  Seems like they could have at least dropped a few rebels off on a safer planet somewhere.  It would have saved them from getting blown up later.  And yes I know Finn was secretly disobeying orders when he left, but maybe that ship should have been Resistance Escape Plan A.

Of course, when he does finally get back, the codebreaking plan doesn't work anyway.  I know it's a bit of a Shaggy Dog Story, but I like that the plot doesn't turn out like you'd think.  Much like Leia's survival, it's an interesting twist that keeps the movie from being predictable.

Leia's use of the Force to survive in space was... well, it's a neat idea, but it looked cheesy on film.  This might sound cold, but they also missed a good opportunity to write her out of the series.  I assume they already have a fate planned for her in Episode 9, so I guess I'll reserve judgment until I see what happens then.  I just hope they still have some unused footage, since they already promised not to resurrect her with CGI.  I'll be kind of annoyed if Episode 9 just mentions her in passing, like "Oh Leia?  She retired on Bespin."

Rey's origin... is Kylo telling the truth?  If so, I'm okay with her being a nobody.  Maybe it's like Anakin, and she was conceived by the Force itself, because the Force needed her to fulfill some big destiny thingamabob.  However, all the hints of her being someone more, like the Unreveal in the cave beneath Luke's island... those teasers aren't going to age well.  It's like the director was playing with the audience, making fun of all the speculation that Rey might be related to a main character.

Snoke's death was pretty cool, and the fight afterwards was beautiful.  But still... I wish they hadn't killed off Snoke without telling us who he really is first.  He's obviously got a history with the other characters.  Leia, Han, and Luke all made references about how Snoke was a bad influence on Kylo, as if he was some sort of old acquaintance or recurring villain.

So this is the worst kind of movie secret - the kind that everyone already knows, except for the audience.  I know there were a lot of crazy theories about him being a resurrected Vader/Palpatine/Plagueis/etc, but I'm okay with him just being an original character.  But there's obviously a story there, and it would have been nice to reveal it before killing him.

But then, maybe they're planning to bring Snoke back.  If he is Plagueis, then he's a master of life and death, which would also explain his long lifespan.  Darth Maul came back in the cartoons, after dying from similar injuries.  So maybe Snoke still has a role left to play.  Yet another element that might not make sense until Episode 9.

My biggest complaint, though, was just the overall unevenness of the movie.  It felt weirdly structured, and overly long.  There were several places where I thought the credits were going to roll.  Not that I dislike the ending, but it just felt like it came way after the climax.  Still, I was never bored.  Action scenes and humorous moments were spread evenly throughout the movie, and I never felt like I was drowning in exposition.  There were pacing problems, but I was always entertained.

All in all, The Last Jedi felt a lot like The Empire Strikes Back: It's a good linking film, but incomprehensible on its own.  I don't think The Last Jedi will truly be appreciated until Episode 9 is out, so we can see where all the plot threads lead.  Until then, it feels less like a story and more like just a bunch of stuff that happens.

Star Wars: The Last Jedi (No Spoilers)

Decent movie, but I didn't like it quite as much as The Force Awakens.  I would probably rate it 7 out of 10 stars.  Enjoyable but flawed, and not as rewatchable as some of the others in the series.

It had tons of great action scenes and beautiful visuals.  However... It was too long, parts of it felt uneven or badly edited, some of the humor felt out of place, and some of the contrivances were just a little too silly.  Still, once again I'm (naively) surprised at how viciously some moviegoers are tearing it apart. It's not perfect, but it's not nearly as bad as so-called "Star Wars fans" are making it out to be.

Right this second, it has a Metacritic score of 86, and a RottenTomatoes score of 93%.  Not bad.  However, the RottenTomatoes audience score is at 56%, and the Metacrtic users are averaging 5.1 (out of 10).  I glanced through the Metacritic reviews, and many of the users are actually giving it zeroes.  I saw multiple reviews that called it the worst Star Wars movie ever. 

I repeat, "the worst Star Wars movie ever".  Look, I'm a prequel apologist.  I gave the prequels higher marks than just about anybody on the internet.  But even I have to admit that The Phantom Menace isn't particularly good.  Do people really think The Last Jedi is worse?

Nope, uh-uh, no way.  Any reviewer who actually thinks TLJ is worse than TPM clearly isn't worth listening to.  If a Last Jedi review starts out with "worst Star Wars movie ever", you can safely skip to the next review.  These people are not worth your time.

Back in 2009 I wrote a blog about "All-Or-Nothing People." To sum up, too many people lack the emotional nuance to give anything a "medium" score.  Everything is pass/fail, and every movie either rocks or sucks. And here we see the phenomenon again, in all its glory.  The Last Jedi is an average Star Wars movie, maybe a little above average, and anyone who gives it a zero is an obvious AON person.

I don't know why I feel the need to defend a movie I didn't particularly love.  It's going to make billions of dollars regardless of how it's received, so I'm not worried about it bombing and leaving us with an incomplete trilogy.  I guess I just want people to dislike things for the right reasons.

Wil Wheaton posted a pretty good (also spoiler free) review here.  He liked it more than I did, and I agree with his reasons why.  His bullet points are spot-on, and any specifics I give on the movie would just be a cheap copy of his list.

My So-Called Gaming Cred

Note: I have an updated version of this list here.

My All-Time Favorite Games:
That's hard to answer, because I like such variety of genres.  Here's the ones I've enjoyed most.  To keep this list from filling up with Metroid sequels, I’m arranging it more by genre.  For each game, I've listed Runners-Up for similar games that also took a lot of my time.

13. Life is Strange (Best Storytelling Game)
Runner-Up: Zak McKracken and the Alien Mindbenders

12. Gauntlet (Best Multiplayer Dungeon Crawl)
Runners-Up: Baldur’s Gate: Dark Alliance, Dungeon Siege

11. Super Mario World (Best Action Platformer Starring A Plumber)
Runners-Up: Super Mario Bros 3, Super Mario Maker

10. Silent Hill 2 (Best Horror)
Runner-Up: Resident Evil 2

9. Mario Kart 8 (Best Racing Game For People Who Don't Like Actual Racing Games)
Runner-Up: Mario Kart 64

8. Dragon Age (Best RPG That's Not Skyrim)
Runner-Up: Knights of the Old Republic, NeverWinter Nights

7. Injustice: Gods Among Us (Best Fighting Game)
Runners-Up: Mortal Kombat 9, Marvel Vs Capcom 2

6. The Legend of Zelda: A Link to the Past (Best Action Adventure Not-Quite RPG)
Runners-Up: LOZ: A Link Between Worlds, LOZ: Ocarina of Time

5. The Sims 4 (Best Time Suck While Wishing I Lived In A Computer)
Runner-Up: The Sims 3

4. Skyrim (Best Immersive First Person RPG)
Runner-Up: Oblivion

3. Chrono Trigger (Best JRPG That Isn't A Final Fantasy Game)
Runner-Up: Earthbound

2. Final Fantasy 6 (Best JRPG Period Hands Down)
Runner-Up: Final Fantasy 7

1. Super Metroid (Best Sci-Fi Action Platformer)
Runners-Up: Metroid Zero Mission, Bionic Commando, Mega Man 2

I've probably missed a few in there but overall I think I've hit the most important ones.

I would define myself as a gamer.  I was practically born with a controller in my hand.  My earliest memories involve arcade games like Asteroids and Space Invaders.  Gaming continues to be my favorite hobby, even if I don't have time to do it as much as I used to.

I've owned the following systems at one time or another: Atari 2600, TRS-80, Commodore 64, Commodore Amiga, 8-bit Nintendo, Super Nintendo, Nintendo 64, Sega Genesis, Sega Saturn, Sony Playstation, Playstation 2, Playstation 4, Wii, Wii U, X-Box 360, Gameboy, Gameboy Advance SP, Sega Game Gear, and Nintendo 3DS.  Yes I'm including old computers in the list because I used them almost exclusively for video games.  Note that these consoles were new when I had them (as opposed to the modern trend of collecting retro systems).  I also play pencil-and-paper RPGs.

Unfortunately, the modern usage of "gamer" brings to mind sexist guys with neckbeards and fedoras, who only play macho games like Call of Duty.  When I was a kid, gamers weren't respected because video games were considered new and evil.  But today, gamers aren't respected because we're often judged by the loudest of us.  Too many people think all gamers are like the whiny MRAs on GameFAQs, because they get the most media attention.

But really, is anyone not a gamer at this point?  Even my elders are constantly playing Candy Crush on their phones these days, while still looking down at the younger generations for being addicted to computer screens.  When I call myself a gamer, it's not just because I like video games, it's because they've been such a big part of my life that they're part of my psychological makeup.  It's because I think about the stories behind games even when I'm not playing them.  Heck, I used to draw comic books based on Metroid.

So even thought I'm not particularly good at video games, and even though I rarely own the newest systems or play the most popular games, I'm definitely a gamer.

Things I like in a game:

1. Customization.  I love to design my own character.  Some game companies put too much thought into designing a marketable main character, when I’m happier with a generic one that I designed myself.  This is kind of what killed the GTA series for me.  In GTA 3 you were a nameless, voiceless thug, but there was a code that let you look like other NPCs in the game.  But later GTA games put too much work into making your character memorable, when all I wanted was to choose my appearance.

2. If deep customization isn’t available, at least give us multiple characters to choose from.  Bonus points if at least one of the characters is female.  I'm about 50% more likely to stick with a game if I can play as a female character.

3. I like games I can break.  I don’t play games for the challenge, I just want to see what happens next.  I don’t like dying and replaying the same levels a lot.  I love it when I can find armor that makes me nearly invincible, or weapons that let me dominate my foes.  After a stressful day at work there’s nothing more fun than mowing down a swarm of enemies.

4. Easy to stop and resume.  This is a more recent thing, as I’ve gotten older and don’t have as much time to play.  I don’t want there to be hours between save points.  I don’t want a plot so complicated that I can’t remember what I was doing if I don’t play for a week.  If the game has quests, I want a journal system that helps me remember them, and a map system that makes it easy to find my next target.  Skyrim was excellent about this.


My Favorite Genres:
I mostly like RPGs, Fighting, Sci-Fi Action, Horror, and Platformers.  However, I'm pretty selective about what games I see through to the end.  These days I tend to buy a lot of cheap games on Steam, then play most of them for about 2 minutes before trying something else.  Maybe one out of 50 games sticks with me, and I'll play it for years.  As much as I love RPGs, I just don't have time to pay attention to long plots any more.  But I do love mindless dungeon crawlers like Torchlight and Dungeon Siege.

Games I've Played the Most:
According to Steam, my most played game is Skyrim, with 148 hours as of this writing.  Of course, that's only Steam games.  I'm sure I've at least that much into The Sims 3, and my Wii U says I've put over 100 hours into Super Mario Maker.  Also, back when I used to host a NeverWinter Nights server, I probably put more hours into NWN than any other game in my life.  And back when I first discovered the internet, I put hundreds of hours into on online game called JediMUD.

JRPGs or Western RPGs?
I like RPGs, but I am picky about them.  I can only name a handful that I’ve played to the end, but those few I’ve played through multiple times.  So I’m very loyal to a small number of RPGs.  I like Western RPGs because they’re more likely to have customizable characters.  I like Japanese RPGs because of the creative characters and stories.  So I would say I’m about 50/50.

Multiplayer:
I’ve loved multiplayer games since the original Gauntlet, but I dislike competitive online shooters.  My favorite multiplayer games are basically Gauntlet derivations: Torchlight, Baldur’s Gate Dark Alliance, Dungeon Siege, and other mindless dungeon crawlers.  I don’t play a lot of these games any more because I don’t see my friends as often, and they never have the same game systems as me.

Consoles or PCs:
This used to be an easy question.  While I had a few gaming computers in the 8-bit era, most of my life has been about consoles.  I really liked how console games were plug-and-play, and you didn't have to worry if your machine had the right specs.  Shove the cartridge in, and you're playing the game within 30 seconds.  But modern consoles are just as bad as PCs about installing games and downloading updates.  And computer games are cool because you can install mods.  So at this point in my life I'd have to say I like both equally.

Favorite System:
The Super Nintendo is hands-down my favorite system of all time.  A lot of that is nostalgia.  It was the first system I earned with my own money, and it came out at just the right time of my life.  The SNES controller is also one of my all-time favorite controllers.

If I were stranded on a deserted island and could only take one game, what would it be?
Probably Skyrim.  There’s just so much to do.  There are several games I like better, but those games are only good for one playthrough every couple of years.  Skyrim consistently surprises me with new areas the more I explore it.  Between the PS4 and the PC, I’ve put more than 200 hours into this game, and I still haven’t seen everything.

Justice League

Just got back from the Justice League movie.

It's still not as fun as the Marvel films, but it's an improvement over Batman v Superman.  Simply put, it's less depressing.  In some ways it felt like watching several mini-films focusing on different characters, until the end when they all fight together.  With that in mind, I'm going to break my thoughts down by character. 

Batman: I'm still not a fan of Batfleck, but I enjoyed his performance here more than I did in BvS. His personality seemed inconsistent to me - there were times when it felt like the writers were trying to make him into Tony Stark, and other times when he was still as dull as he was in BvS.  Technically I think this was the result of multiple script writers, but in-universe I'm going to chalk it up to this being late in his career.  This Batman has been fighting crime for 20 years, so he's learned to lighten up sometimes.

The Flash: He was the tipping point that makes the movie watchable.  Without his humor, the movie would have been another snoozefest.  He's not my favorite version of the Flash, and his costume hurts my eyes, but overall I like him.  I can't wait to see him in future films.

Wonder Woman:  As usual, Gal Gadot is the best thing in the movie.  She doesn't do much here that we didn't already see in the last two films, but she feels like the most solid character to me. 

Cyborg: He was pretty good.  I like what he brings to the team.  However, there isn't much to him yet.

Aquaman: While I generally like his character design, I didn't like the surfer dude aspect of his personality - he's supposed to be Atlantean royalty, and yet he sounds like a caveman.

Martian Manhunter: Made you look.

Steppenwolf: Ugh, this villain was terrible.  I don't know if they should have gone ahead and used Darkseid, but Steppenwolf was so dull.  He was two dimensional and badly rendered.  I did like the his outfit (he looked more like Ares than Ares did in Wonder Woman), but I wish they'd picked someone with more name recognition.  I guess with all the hero backstories going on, they didn't want to use up a villain who would need a lengthy origin story.

Bottom line:
It's not as good as Wonder Woman, but it's fun and gives me hope for the future.  Maybe DC will learn their lesson.  If the next Justice League movie uses a tone more like the animated series, this cast should work just fine.

Wonder Woman, GotG2, and Spider-Man Homecoming

So, in the past month I’ve seen three super hero movies - Spider-Man Homecoming, Guardians of the Galaxy 2, and Wonder Woman.  All three were incredible, and you can’t go wrong with any of them.

Possible minor spoilers ahead.

Wonder Woman

This was my least favorite of the three, but don’t take that as a negative when the competition’s so fierce.  It’s like saying pizza is your least favorite out of pizza, sex, and video games.  It’s just that a lot of my love for the Wonder Woman movie is actually relief.  Relief that the current DC movie continuity isn’t completely cursed, and relief that a female-led superhero movie can actually do well.  The movie’s biggest strength is that it fills me with hope for future movies.  Wonder Woman gets so much right, and was so necessary to the movie industry, that it feels like sacrilege to point out the flaws. 

But to be completely honest, I think the movie is sort of generic.  90% of what I loved about the movie only worked because it was Wonder Woman.  If they’d swapped her out for a male character (let’s say Hercules if we want to keep the general theme), it would have been just another forgettable action flick.  I love the movie, but it’s not going to be as rewatchable as the Marvel films.

Most movies try to save the best stuff for the end, but I found WW more entertaining at the beginning.  The first half of the movie is outstanding, but the it gets a little dull towards the end, and the final battle is just your standard boss fight.  The villains didn’t exactly sweep me off my feet, and the casting of the Big Bad seemed like an odd choice.  More than anything I see the movie as a foot in the door, proof that female superheroes can succeed in Hollywood after all.  In a future where female-led superhero films are more common, I’m not sure Wonder Woman will really stand out much.  But the success of Wonder Woman means that future might actually happen, and that’s very important.

Guardians of the Galaxy 2

This is my favorite of the three.  If you liked the first one, it’s more of the same, though there’s more character development this time.  While I love the first GotG, the characters were one-dimensional quip-generators, kind of like Suicide Squad in space.  The sequel gives them more depth, which slows down the movie but not enough to make it boring.

The opening battle is one of my favorite movie sequences of all time.  From the trailers, that particular fight looked underwhelming to me.  But in the film itself, they actually made the scene better by taking the focus off the fighting itself.  For spoilers sake I won’t to go into detail, but it had me dancing and singing in my seat.

People find me strange because I’m not very much into music.  (Well, that’s not the only reason they find me strange.)  In my life I’ve owned maybe 3 tapes and 6 CDs, and the ones I’ve owned haven’t seen a lot of use.   I don’t have to listen to music while I’m driving, I don’t go to concerts, and I never just sit and listen to music while doing nothing else.  I generally consider music as something to keep it from being too quiet, but I've never been into it.  And yet, roughly 50% of my love for the GotG movies has to do with the soundtrack.  The music ties into the action so well, that I simply can’t imagine the same films with a standard issue orchestral score.  I’m happy to report GotG2’s soundtrack is just as good as the first, if not better.

GotG2 is definitely the most rewatchable of the three movies I’m reviewing here, and I can’t wait to wear out the blu-ray when it’s released.  I will say that of the three, this movie is the least child-friendly (which is a weird thing to say about a movie with a talking raccoon).  I don’t know if I would bring a small child to this one, as some of the language is a little strong for young ears (including a scene where they talk about Ego's penis), and some of the death scenes are a bit graphic.  Not actually bloody, just… explicit.

Spider-Man: Homecoming

A lot of people complain about reboots, and the Spider-Man franchise is their go-to example.  Personally, I’m okay rebooting a series if you have a good reason for doing so.  But I do hold a reboot to higher standards – did you really have an idea worth throwing out the old continuity?   In this case, definitely yes.  Bringing Spidey into the MCU was the best thing that could have happened to the character.  It changes the character so much.  In the previous films he’s pretty much the only superhero in the world (as far as we know), but in the MCU he has people to look up to.  Instead of just “I can outdo myself and help more people,” now there’s the additional element of “I want to impress the Avengers.”

I think the smartest thing they did was skip his origin story almost entirely.  At this point everyone in the audience knows how Peter got his powers, and there was no reason to waste screen time on it.  There’s one short conversation about getting bitten by a radioactive spider, but there’s almost no mention of Uncle Ben or how power relates to responsibility.  Instead Peter’s moral code is just based around “it’s the right thing to do,” which is deep enough for a 15-year old boy, as far as I’m concerned.  I think the Civil War movie summed it up best when Peter said, “When you can do the things that I can, but you don't, and then the bad things happen? They happen because of you.”  Which is basically a different way of saying “with great power…” but sounds a lot more like how people actually talk.

Michael Keaton did a great job, and I found him a lot more believable than the ax-crazy moustache-twirling villains Spider-Man usually fights.  In some ways I found his motivations a little too understandable, and I have to wonder how many of my friends would turn to supervillainy if presented with the same circumstances.  Occasionally he'd lapse into his Beetlejuice voice for a second, which was distracting, but I didn't mind.

I loved the overall tone of the film.  When the Ant-Man movie came out I kept saying how glad I was to see them using different genres.  Instead of everything being just a “Superhero Action” film, some of them focus on comedy, sci-fi, drama, and so on.  Well, Homecoming is a high school comedy that also happens to be a super hero film.  I’ve seen several reviewers compare Homecoming to a modern John Hughes film, which might be giving Homecoming too much credit, but it’s easy to see what they mean.

So if you only get to see one of the above movies, which should you see?

Well, GotG2 is my favorite, but for other people I’m going to have to recommend Spider-Man.  I think it has more universal appeal.  But let’s face it, if you’re fanatic enough to be reading this, you’re probably going to see all three eventually.

DCTV

Gotham - We watched the first five or six episodes of Gotham, but it was just too dark for us.  I've never been able to get into criminal-focused shows.  Real life is depressing enough, and I'd rather focus on the good guys than the bad.

Arrow - I've tried to get into Arrow, but I just haven't.  It's not as dark as Gotham, but it's still a bit too dark for me.  Plus the cheesy parts are a little too cheesy, probably because they stand out more against all the dark.  When the whole Arrow team gets into costume, it just looks like cosplay to me, because the rest of the world is so gritty and real.

The Flash - This is the best super hero show on television.  Yes it's even cheesier than Arrow, but that's the theme of the show and it's just good fun.  It's like a live action cartoon.  The cast really works well together, and I really enjoy seeing their takes on DC villains.

Legends of Tomorrow - It's kind of fun.  I enjoy watching it.  But, I don't know, it just doesn't feel structured enough for me.  They threw all these characters into a blender and hoped something cohesive would come out, but really it's just kind of a chaotic mess.  But it's a fun mess.

I think my biggest problem with LOT so far, is that I feel like I've seen most of what it has to offer.  They spent the first season bouncing around from time period to time period, always with the same mission (track down Vandal Savage in that time).  I like some of the characters more than others, but I don't find myself in love with any of them.  The breakout character is Captain Cold, and even he got less interesting as time goes on.

But some of the things I've heard about season 2 have piqued my interest, so I'm still going to give it another go.

Supergirl - I'm trying so hard to like this.  Supergirl is one of my favorite comic book characters, and I really want more female superhero shows to gain popularity.  Producers are so leery of female superhero movies, because most of them have tanked hard.  Never mind that those movies were just bad on many levels that had nothing to do with the hero's gender.  If we can just get a few good ones out there to break the perceived curse, then maybe it will open the door for more to be made.

But honestly, the Supergirl TV series is lukewarm at best.  I really like the casting job on the title character, but the rest of the cast is kind of meh.  Hardly anybody has a lot of chemistry together, and I just don't like how some characters are portrayed.  The government agent characters are especially annoying, going back and forth from "all business" to "touchy feely" so much I get whiplash.

And I really don't like most of the villains.  There seems to be a tradition now where the first episode sets up where most of the show's villains will come from.  It makes the writing easier, and keeps you from wasting a lot of screen time on villain origin stories.  Smallville had the kryptonite give everybody different super powers.  The Flash's villains mostly got their powers the same way he got his.  Well, Supergirl has Fort Rozz, a Kryptonian prison from which powerful aliens keep escaping.  I'm just not digging that plotline.

There's an overarching plot about a group of evil Kryptonians, and frankly they're just boring.  I've never been fond of having too many Kryptonians in a Superman-family series; the Kryptonians bored me in Lois and Clark, they bored me in Smallville, and they bore me here.  I've always preferred the continuities where Kryptonian survivors were kept to a minimum.

Supergirl's not great, but it's got room for growth, and I really hope it gets better in the second season.  I know there's going to be a lot of changes with it changing networks, so hopefully it will be enough to save the show.

DCAU - Of course, none of these shows are anywhere near as awesome as the Justice League and Young Justice animated shows.   That entire era of the DCAU was some of the best stuff on television.  Unfortunately, as of the “Flashpoint” animated movie, that era is pretty much over.  The new series of movies is a lot more adult, and a lot less fun.  I still keep adding the new animated movies to my Netflix queue, and I don't hate them... but man, they used to be so much better.

DC Twofer: Suicide Squad and The Killing Joke

Much like Green Lantern and Catwoman, Suicide Squad was not quite as bad as everyone wants it to be.  Yeah, yeah, you can't take my word for it; I like a lot of bad movies.  But for me, Suicide Squad was bad in all the right ways.  Yes, the story doesn't make any sense.  Yes, it was re-edited at the last minute, leaving it a bit incoherent.  Yes, there are plot holes galore.

But all that works for it.  The movie is intentionally chaotic, and the schizophrenic editing fits perfectly with the tone of the film.  Why would anyone want this movie to make sense?  I don't want to see a serious movie about a bunch of crazy comic book villains forced to save the world.  Batman v Superman was coherent and serious, and it sucked.  Suicide Squad is the exact opposite of BvS.  It's a series of barely-connected flashes of violence and comedy, and while it's not for everyone, I thought it was quite fun.

Bottom line:  It's not good, and it's not for everyone, but it's crazy fun if you're in that kind of mood.

I also had the the chance to see the animated "The Killing Joke" on the big screen.  I first read the comic back in the 80s, and I've always had mixed feelings about it. Depending on how you look at it, it's either the best Joker story ever told, or the worst Batgirl story ever told.  Since I'm more of a Batgirl fan than a Joker fan, you can guess which way I lean.

For those not in the know (spoilers ahead), The Killing Joke tells the Joker's origin story.  There have been several versions of his origin, but this one has always been my favorite.  It tells how a struggling comedian has one very bad day, causing him to lose his mind.  It flashes back and forth from the Joker's memory to present day, where the Joker is trying to give Commissioner Gordon a similar bad day.

And part of that bad day includes crippling Gordon's daughter, who happens to be Batgirl. Fans will argue all day long whether this was a good or bad for the character.  After all, it did lead to her becoming Oracle, one of the greatest characters in DC history.  But it also uses Batgirl - one of my favorite heroes of all time - as an object. Barbara is not a character in the comic so much as a plot device, who is crippled just to move the story forward.

The animated version attempts to rectify this by adding a Batgirl story to the beginning (and a small scene at the end that wraps things up).  Unfortunately, the Batgirl story isn't very good.  Worse yet, it's too obvious where the new story ends and comic adaptation begins.  The writing is so different once it turns into The Killing Joke.  They barely wrote any script at all, and mostly just read straight from the comic.  Which brings us to the next problem - some lines that read well in print sound silly when said out loud.

They also made one tiny addition that really bugged me.  Fans have debated for years whether the Joker raped Barbara.  Personally, I never felt he did.  Perfectly Blunt Disclaimer:  I'm not trying to argue whether or not stripping her and taking photos constitutes rape.  He definitely did do that, and if that fits your definition of rape, I won't disagree. But for the purposes of this blog, I'm defining rape as actual sexual penetration. 

The Joker is single-minded, and he took the photos hoping to drive Jim Gordon mad. Now, I could possibly see Joker raping her if he intended to include that in the photos, but when we see the photos, the Joker isn't in any of them.  Granted, the reader isn't shown all the photos.  But I think the artist would have shown at least part of the Joker in at least one of the shown photos, if he was trying to imply physical assault.

Plus, there's the scene where Batman visits Barbara in the hospital.  I strongly feel that if she had been raped, it would have been mentioned there.  Harvey Bullock tells Batman that they found her in a state of undress, and Batman replies, "Undress?"  Bullock answers by telling him they found a lens cap nearby, and he thinks the Joker may have taken some pictures.  If she'd been raped, Bullock would have mentioned it here. 

But that's the comic.  In the animated version, they added one short scene where Batman questions some prostitutes about the Joker's whereabouts.  Their answers seem to indicate that Barbara really was raped, at least in this version.  I don't like that at all.  I know it's a weird double standard.  I can accept the Joker as a psycho clown who murders on a whim, but making him a rapist just makes it too real. 

I'd generally prefer if they'd keep rape out of comics entirely, but I'm also against censorship so it's kind of a catch-22.  But then, I'm not really asking them to censor stories.  It's more accurate to say I'm want them to write stories that I find entertaining, and rape is too volatile a subject to use lightly.  I read comics because they make me smile, and I stop smiling when a character is raped.

The internet is full of people who believe Babs was raped.  It just goes to show that people interpret ambiguous scenes differently, and that's fine.  If a feminist tells me BG was raped, and why it's a sign that women are treated terribly in comics, I listen.  But what bugs me is all the dudebros who seem to want her to have been raped.   The guys who argue passionately that it happened, because they just don't like the Joker character as much if he's not a rapist.  Those guys scare me, and it sickens me that comics are written to please them.

Anyway, Mark Hamill did an excellent job as usual, and most of the rest of the voice cast was great.  However, I was not fond of Commissioner Gordon (Ray Wise).  His lines were very flat, like he wasn't getting into it at all.  The animation was done well, and they did a great job making it look like the comic.

Bottom line: It was nice to see one of my favorite old comics brought to life, but I can't say I really enjoyed it.  I probably won't watch it again. 

Unfriended

A teenager kills herself after an embarrassing video of her is posted online.  Then her ghost comes back to torment her former friends.  Unfriended is a pretty basic story, nothing that's going to make you say wow.  The difference is in how the film is presented.  All the viewer sees is the main character's computer screen.  The movie is shown as if we're seeing live feed from her laptop.  We watch her move the arrow around and see everything she clicks in real time.  In one window she's talking to her friends over Skype.  In another, she has a private chat going on with her boyfriend.  She has her music playlist in another window.  In her web browser, she has Facebook and YouTube open, and she does other web searches over the course of the movie as the plot demands.

And we don't just see what she does, but we see what she almost does.  We see every sentence she almost types, then erases and rewords before hitting enter.  Because of this, we're privy to her thought process, giving us more insight than movies usually offer.  While the characters know a lot more than the audience initially sees, over the course of the movie you find out more of the details that led up to their friend's suicide.  Again, none of the revelations are going to blow you away, but the style is so original that it's hard to look away.  Despite the relatively simple plot, this is one of those movies where you need to pay attention every minute (sometimes to two things at once) or you might miss something significant.

It's tempting to compare this to "found footage" movies like Blair Witch or Cloverfield.  However, found footage movies are inherently less scary to me because, by definition, everything in the movie has already happened.  Unfriended, however, is presented in such a way that it feels like it's happening right now... to you.  If you let yourself get drawn in, then your TV screen becomes your laptop.  The limited view increases your fear, because you feel like something's in the room with you, but you can't make main character turn her head to see.

As much as I liked the concept, I hope this doesn't become a genre like found footage movies did.  The uniqueness of this film is what makes it cool, and it's definitely worth seeing once.  But in some ways it's more like reading a movie than watching one, and once you're over the novelty of the format, it's not the kind of experience you're likely to sit through twice. 

So give this movie a try.   And for extra fun, watch it on your laptop.