Birds of Prey trailer I - Oct 1

Obligatory disclaimer: real life sucks. Now onto TV land?

Ok, first I need to address some issues that arose from my previous posts. What are they, as follows?

First, someone has commented that the end of BBR, we see the door of another motorhome open to release its’ inhabitant, who will help the Motorhome family of No Name get through the destruction of their own motorhome. Yay! …It is also supposed to show that humans do not have any great advantage now that the dinosaurs and the other prehistoric reptiles are out and about. Fair enough.

Now, the entire premise of the original JP movie was all about ‘life will find a way’, which echoed, however distantly, the message of the original JP novel, as spoken by that version of Ian Malcolm. Yay, (the novel’s version of Ian Malcolm does little more but blather after its’ version of the initial T-Rex attack; it has its’ own share of flaws, but we are not talking about them here), so what does the franchise’s reboot do?

…Bring back not only Dr. Grant, Dr. Sattler, and Ian Malcolm for its’ final film, but also Hammond’s grandchildren, Tim and Lexy, (do not confuse her with Rexy – Lex/Lexy is a human young woman, while Rex/Rexy is an aged female Tyrannosaurus. They are different). The fans are quite happy with this fan service, but will it help the franchise? Considering that they already have the ‘new’ characters – Owen, Claire, Maisie, Franklin and Zara – this leaves them with a lot of characters to juggle around, and killing any of them will likely backfire by enraging the fans!..

On the contrary, and this brings me to my other critique, ‘Insatiable’ the Netflix series has gone the other way around – it seems to have largely removed the entire WG/WL issue from its content, (there’s a scene of Patty compulsively eating, but this it so far), rebooting itself as a standard black humor drama/comedy; the trailer for S2 is much better and far less messier than it was for S1. It still is not for everybody, but least it is not offensive. So kudos to ‘Insatiable’ here and now; sorry for bitching about you in my previous blog entry.

…And now that we have this out if the way, let us move onto the main event: the ‘Birds of Prey’ first main trailer. What can be said about it? The 2016 ‘Suicide Squad’ movie was a mess. It was not a bad film, but it had plenty of room to improve, and apparently, it is going through a reboot now. By contrast, the upcoming ‘Birds of Prey’ film will be focusing on Harley Quinn’s character, and her emancipation. This is not a problem; the problem is that it appears that they will be cramming several years of worth of her emancipation in the comics into a single film. Compounding this is the fact that the BP movie itself already feels chaotic, in a bad way: there are characters from all strata of DC comics – there’s HQ herself, there’s the Huntress, there’s officer Montoya, there’s the Black Mask, there’s Cassandra Cain, whose version in DCEU clearly has a long way to go before she reaches her kick-ass levels in DC comics, (where she is one of the Bat-family, BTW). The trailer itself gives surprisingly very little exposition for such an action-filled piece: I think that Harley and her posse will be saving Cassandra from the Black Mask and his people? Yeah, there are worse films in DCEU, including the ‘Suicide Squad 2016’ itself, let along the ‘Justice League’ film, but still. I am of the mixed feelings when it comes to BP.

A special shout-out should be done for the hyenas that we also see in this trailer. Obviously, just as in the TLK-reboot, they are CGI – they may not be as impressive and regal as the African lions are in real life, but their teeth and jaws can crack bone, so it is hardly unlikely that any movie will be featuring them as real life animals. They are supposedly not that easily trained either.

…There are rumors that the beast of Gevaudan, a much-discussed wolf-like cryptid of the pre-revolutionary France, had been either a spotted, or more realistically a striped, hyena, released into the French wilderness. How probable is that is debatable, but this is one of the more popular theories when dealing with this monster, and I felt that it should be mentioned, because Joker. He is not in the BP movie, it seems. Considering that we are talking about the Jared Leto version here, it isn’t too surprising; regardless of how you feel about the 2016 movie in general, its’ Joker had certainly sucked. Not surprising, then, that BP feel probably not feature him in person, but trying to cram several years’ worth of Harley’s character development in comics into a single film is not the best solution either. Ah well, we will just have to wait and see what will be revealed regarding the BP movie next.

…This is it for now, see you all soon!

Insatiable S2 - Sep 30

Obligatory disclaimer: real life sucks. So, we turn to TV land, and what do we see there?

These days – the autumn of 2019 – a lot of brand new, forgettable shows, such as ‘Bob hearts Abishola’, ‘Prodigal Son’, ‘Stumptown’ and so on. So, what does Netflix do instead? Does it jump on the wagon of newness? No, it is going to release the second season of ‘Insatiable’ instead. Why?

…Well, the obvious reason is that someone in the higher ranks of Netflix wasn’t getting enough head; they demanded it, and were told that in return ‘Insatiable’ was to get its’ second season. After doing some research and learning that the really good hos that gave the really good head were really expansive, whereas to shoot, produce and air the second season of ‘Insatiable’ would be the cheaper option out of the two, the high-level Netflix member went for the cheaper option – ‘Insatiable’ S2, and here we are: it is going to air on October 11, 2019, in less than two weeks from today, (aka September 30, 2019). The end.

…Sorry for being so crude, but as we have discussed before, ‘Insatiable’ isn’t any good, but is very cringeworthy; it has pissed enough people with the way it has handled WG and WL issues (including social acceptance of overweight people, among other things), so the best thing would’ve to let it go, no matter how good Debbie Ryan is as an actress. Instead, we got S2. Sigh. Maybe this time ‘Insatiable’ will leave the weight-related issues behind and be just a drama-comedy instead, teen-related or not, but I am not betting on this. Anything else?

…The other shows that have come out in autumn 2019 seem to be overwhelmingly bland and forgettable; for example, the aforementioned ‘Bob’ is a collection of bland, politically correct skits; the show was supposedly produced by the same people that gave us TBBT – this decade’s answer to ‘Friends’. It most certainly was – both shows started as part awkwardly adorable, part cringeworthily stereotypical, and over time evolved into oversized monsters that have overstayed their welcome. TBBT’s spirit already lives on in ‘Young Sheldon’, which feels less like a prequel and more like a spin-off of some sort sometimes. That said, so far ‘Bob’ has nothing in common with TBBT, so to connect the latter with the former is just pointless right now.

‘Stumptown’ is somewhat better, but so far it is putting most of its money on Cobie Smulders, better known as agent Maria Hill from MCU, (including AoS, but only very sporadically). Will she deliver? – again, we will just have to wait and see. (The rest of the new shows are not that different in a better way, alas).

…Yes, this is a sombre entry into the blog, but as I said above, real life sucks. Just ask the Canadian West, which got hit with a lot of snow yesterday/today. It is not pretty, and yet people there got to live with it – but that is life. You got to live with it, until you die – just like the skunk that I have come across on a street, since it was already dead when I discovered it. And we are talking about a striped skunk, whose skunk stench packs quite a punch. Of course, between us humans, you can try to do something else – but if this ‘something else’ turns out to be illegal, (and that is a highly likely scenario), then you got new problems on top of the old ones, and that just makes it all worse. Or better, if you are an optimist, unlike me, who is a pessimist instead. Still, since ‘Insatiable’ is coming back with an S2 on October 11, 2019, it is hard to be an optimist. Real life sucks, and MM (mass media) does everything to make it worth.

This is it for now, I guess. See you all soon!

More Marvel - Sep 27

…To continue the issue of Marvel and mutants, because real life sucks – just ask Judge Cavanaugh and Dr. Ford – two more things should be mentioned, perhaps. One is that ‘Daredevil’ S3 is coming to Netflix in October 2018. This is Marvel, but not mutants – usually Daredevil stays separate from the X-Men and their crowd, though in the comics he did team up once with Wolverine and Jubilee to stop the Hand and their latest plot, but right now, on TV – not so much. Rather, from the trailers that we have seen, he might be going against Wilson Fisk/the Kingpin once again. (Maybe Punisher could help, but so far, there is no new info about him).

And the second? The ‘X-Men: Dark Phoenix’ film has released its’ first trailer.

Now, here is the thing: ‘Dark Phoenix’ has nothing in common with ‘Insatiable’ – do people still remember that damn mess? Hopefully, it had been forgotten by now, but one of the things that contributed to its’ failure was its’ poorly designed trailer, which was badly put together, chaotic. The trailer of ‘Dark Phoenix’ has a similar feeling – it is chaotic, unintentionally designed to overwhelm the audiences with maximum of info in a minimal amount of time, just as the trailer of ‘Insatiable’ sought to do, also unintentionally. The result? While undoubtedly the ‘Dark Phoenix’ movie will be good, and maybe even better than the previous ‘evil Jean X-Men’ movie, where Wolverine had to fix everything, as he always does, because Cyclops and Xavier got offed by Jean earlier in the film, right now, the first expressions of ‘Dark Phoenix’ are mixed. Good luck to team Disney/FOX in sorting it all out.

Finally, speaking of movies – ‘Venom’ is coming to the movie theaters in October 2018 too. It will be interesting to watch, (plus its’ trailers were all done correctly, off topic). As it was already established, Carnage will not be in the movie, but some other symbionts – especially Rampage – will be, and Venom might be unable to defeat them through sheer physical strength alone, some more sophisticated strategies might be required. Since Venom tends to go more with its’ instincts than intelligence, Eddie might have his work cut out for both of them – but again, we will have to wait and see as to what will develop in the movie.

…Well, this is it for now – I will see you in the future.

Insatiable III - Aug 15

These days, both ‘C&D’ and ‘Reverie’ are over. Boo, but at least we can always download ‘C&D’ from Freeform™ and co., so there is that. Moreover, ‘Runaways’ S2 is coming in December 2018, and ‘The Gifted’ S2 – in September 2018, (and DCEU’s ‘Titans’ are coming in autumn 2018 as well), so there is that. Anything else?

Firstly, apparently, the ‘Crazy Rich Asians’ film was made based on all three novels of KK’s original trilogy, so it is different from the books. Yay? Probably, because the original novels didn’t go down so hot, at least not in Canada: they were being sold at a flat rate of $15 a book, and people weren’t buying them, regardless of all the excitement that Indigo and KK’s team tried to make of them. Right now, there’s a lot of talk as to how the movie will make or break the Asian-American flow in Hollywood…so, apparently, this puts the film on the level with the first transgender woman succeed in the U.S. politics at last…and this, technically, brings us back to ‘Insatiable’.

Why are we still kicking this dead horse? Probably because of Debbie Ryan, who seems to have become the latest young actress that is trying to survive in her post-Disney era. There’s Miley Cyrus, who burned her bridges with Disney so much, that no one remembers ‘Hannah Montana’ anymore; there’s Selena Gomez, for whom Disney took ‘The Wizards of Waverly Place’ and made it into her own show; and now there’s Debbie, who started her acting career in ‘The Suite Life on Deck’ portion of ‘The Suite Life’ series with the Sprouse twins, and where’s ‘The Suite Life’ now? Gone, just as ‘Hannah Montana’, ‘The Wizards’ and ‘Jessie’ are. ‘Jessie’ is the show that made Debbie into a lead actress, not one of several, as ‘The Suite Life on Deck’ did, BTW, but now it is also gone. Disney does have this trait – once a show is done, it is done, and everyone goes their separate ways. There was a crossover between ‘The Wizards’, ‘The Suite Life’ and ‘Hannah Montana’, and nothing came out of it. ‘Jessie’ got crossed with both ‘Good Luck Charlie’ and ‘Austin and Ally’ – ditto. Even before Disney teamed up with Marvel to manifest MCU, it tried to do something similar with its’ YA TV shows… but it didn’t quite work, most likely because Disney didn’t really want to commit entirely to it too.

…However, this was then. What now? Now Debbie, (known in this incarnation as Patty instead), is starring in ‘Insatiable’, a TV show that is supposed to be fat-positive, but comes across as fataphobic instead. Put more precisely, it sucks. On one hand, it deals with Debbie’s character in a not-very-funny way, the fat suit isn’t bad, but the jokes? They can be tone-deaf, and that is really ‘Insatiable’s’ true problem: it does not understand the material that it tries to address. It tries to be fat-positive, LGBTQ+ positive, and so on, but it comes across as phobic at worst and clichéd at best instead. There are all of the fat-related issues, and then there are the ‘me too’ issues: for a large part of the released episodes Patty is in not a relationship with an older man, who has been accused, (falsely or not is another issue), of molesting a teenage girl already, and the show makes it into a joke. Great. Lately there has been a report of Catholic priests also harassing teenagers across the U.S. and the pope has done nothing. Oh, how we are laughing!

That is probably the other reason as to why ‘Insatiable’ is failing, (it made 13% on Rotting Tomatoes site or some similar number) – it has bad timing; Netflix, or whoever it was behind the mental works of ‘Insatiable’ failed to realize the reality of the world where ‘Insatiable’ was going to be released into, and viewed.

No, seriously – for months now, the American in particular, and the Western in general, society was dealing with the ‘me too’ movement and what it means to both men and women, both personally and professionally. It is a thorny, complex, complicated issue, and the current political climate isn’t making it any better – and then along comes ‘Insatiable’ where Patty seems to be going into a very murky relationship with Bob, the pageant coach, while another student, Brick, is sleeping with an older woman. Just what the scriptwriters were thinking? That it will be funny? Why?

…Maybe at another time – yes, but here and now – no, just no, and this probably brings us back to the rebooted ‘Ghostbusters’, because they are in the same boat: an assumption was made that they will succeed, because the original movie was a success, and all that the new movie had to do was to gender flip its’ characters – and it didn’t work. The movie itself was a flop, and the ‘Ghostbusters’ franchise itself experienced a backlash; the same thing happened with an equally unsuccessful reboot of the ‘Gilmore Girls’ franchise, to a point where it was abandoned, as are the ‘Ghostbusters’. SW, who is also experiencing franchise-related issues, are so far holding more strongly, there are rumors of an Obi-Wan Kenobi movie already. Considering that the Solo movie made only tens of millions of dollars, rather than the hundreds expected by Disney and co., I should not, and will not make any hopeful or positive predictions just yet.

Finally – speaking of rumors – there is one regarding a ‘Frozen 2’ movie. Well, no, it is not a rumor anymore, ‘Frozen 2’ is really in the works, and is scheduled to release in November 2019. Good for them, but because of its’ success, and the popularity of Elsa’s character, there might be some tough times ahead – too many people think that Elsa should be heterosexual, or homosexual, or asexual, and so, however Disney will depict her in ‘Frozen 2’, there will be upset people, and Disney hates upsetting people, because it means losing revenue – but that is all in the future.

And for now? This is all. See you all soon!

Insatiable II - Aug 8

Life cannot be avoided, and while it can be changed, even that is not done easily. The end of the introduction, now onto more pleasant – and unreal – topics.

Firstly, more info about the ‘Insatiable’ series proper. Just like the trailer, the series itself is a bunch of good ideas executed badly, an approach that can, well, backfire onto the original messages; there are some scenes in the episodes that cast a bad light on the entire ‘me too’ movement in real life, (where it already encounters issues not foreseen by its’ makers), for example.

Again, this is no end of the world, ‘Insatiable’ can fix it, if it survives beyond the first season; and if it does not, that is the end of that. Debbie Ryan used to star in Disney shows, so she still got some momentum left, most likely, and will survive that setback too. Whether Netflix and co. can afford it in the increasingly toxic and politic atmosphere of the U.S. society is another matter.

This brings us to MCU, because as we have discussed earlier, it, and especially AoS, had its own share of problems regarding good ideas depicted badly. This time, though, people have pointed out that ABC, aside from AoS, AC and ‘InHumans’ had also fiddled with a TV series called ‘Most Wanted’ that was supposed to star Nick Blood and Adrienne Palicki, aka Hunter and Morse from AoS. But! ‘Most Wanted’ failed on its pilot episode level, so it does not count. It certainly matters – Blood did return to AoS in S5: for a single episode, where his role was almost superfluous and unnecessary on one hand, and for an interview, which was very brief and perfunctory too. There’s clearly some bad blood between AoS (MCU?) and those two actors, something that AoS (and the rest of MCU?) could do without…so it is unlikely that ‘Most Wanted’ will appear on TV, or at least – not as how it was initially planned.

The other possibility is regarding ‘Damage Control’, which was a subsidiary of S.H.I.E.L.D., or something related, that was supposed to fix S.H.I.E.L.D.’s mistakes on a physical, obvious level. There were rumors about a show based on that back in AoS S3, but nothing came out of it, even the rumors died, so it is hard to say just how likely that a show like that will happen.

This brings us to the movies in general. The month of August 2018 brings us such diverse films as ‘The Meg’, which can be called ‘Not Another Fictional Shark Monster Movie’. I do not remember if we have discussed in detail or not why the fictional megalodon does not have much in common with the real life shark that died out during the Miocene-Pliocene epochs, but it is irrelevant; ‘The Meg’ is coming to the movie screens, and everyone sounds excited; couldn’t someone make a sea monster movie starring a good old-fashioned sea serpent instead? Now that would be unusual!

And then there are the ‘Rich Crazy Asians’, yet another movie-version of a novel. It already sounds like an opportunity for Hollywood’s Asian-American actors. Yay! However, the novel itself? It is a soap opera-drama-etc. with only some ethnic Asian flavor; having read it, I found it actually bland; there are some Asian features in the novel, but mostly as decoration; beneath it, ‘Rich Crazy Asians’ is generic, and it showed: the sales of novel and its’ sequels, (again, it is a trilogy), were very low. Maybe the movie will be better; so far, it is anyone’s guess…

Well, this is it for now; see you all soon!

Insatiable - July 24

So, ‘Insatiable’. Why take two cents on it?

Because it is reminiscent of the SW and its’ post-merger-with-Disney problems, that is why.

What did we see?

A trailer, which starred the main character of the upcoming show – Debbie Ryan. At first she is in a fat suit and everyone hates her; then her character loses weight over the summer, (got into a fight over food, acquired a broken jaw and had to fast all those weeks), and became ‘hot’. As in ‘sexy’. So?

Firstly, this story sounds already tropish and clichéd. The concept of an overweight, or a fat, woman, losing her bulk and becoming sexy, has been in use for a long while now, especially in various soap operas and the like. None of them use this concept as a fat-positive thing…because it is not. It is fat-negative, pure and simple, so for the ‘Insatiable’ crew to declare that their TV series will be so is either a lie, a straightforward one, which is bad, or their (first) trailer was just poorly designed and has currently shot the entire upcoming series in the foot, which isn’t very good either. In the trailer, to elaborate, we see Debbie’s character Patty decide that rather becoming a brand-new person, she would have revenge on everyone else, and we see footage of her punching another girl in the face at one moment and in another pouring…something (it can booze, or pee, or gasoline), over a sleeping boy, (after the two of them had sex). How exactly is this positive anything? It would make more sense to assume that Patty was always an unpleasant person, only now that she’s thin nobody notices it – not at first – and so she’s free to do whatever she wants, which is to say – be an unpleasant and a bad person. How is this positive?

…Meanwhile, Netflix airing another TV series, about another heavy young woman named Sierra, and this series is very different; it is another variant of the Cyrano story. In the original version, Cyrano was a very eloquent, but ugly man – he had a big nose, rather like HP’s professor Snape, but unlike the latter, he was very meticulous about his looks, (inasmuch as it could be helped), and a master duelist as well, so fewer people wanted to fight him than they did Snape…before Snape became a Potions’ Master, an Animagus, a Death Eater, and so on. He certainly had no problem in whipping Lockhart back in HP&CS either, but then again, we are talking about Lockhart here, so yeah. Where were we?

…One of the main plotlines of the Cyrano story was when he was helping another nobleman – a handsome man, who was as dumb as a rock…basically, a stereotypical rock – woo a maiden by being Cyrano’s mouthpiece – and the same we see in the Sierra’s trailer, where she uses one of her classmates – a pretty girl who is failing her classes – to act as Sierra’s mouthpiece to win over another one of their classmates…a handsome jock. How exactly this is more radical and fat-positive than ‘Insatiable’, exactly?

Actually, it is not. ‘Insatiable’ is the more radical one, ironically, but it just is not fat-positive. The word itself, ‘positive’, has a bunch of associations tied to it by now, and people know how to use them in a story, especially in a visual one – in a cinema, on TV or on a YouTube channel, to name a few sources. You try to subvert them…and you might succeed, or your followers might, where you have failed.

This is where that SW make an appearance. After their merger, Disney did not make a complete reboot of the series, rather they are continuing in the general direction of GL, but due to a series of surprising decisions (from Disney) that were discussed at another time, they were able to split their fanbase into a number of fractions, and it isn’t the case of a vocal minority – a single one; rather, this is a case of several fractions, all of whom are vocal and also warring with each other: the best case for scaring away new fans as well as for losing old ones. Both Disney and SW are media juggernauts, but their latest movie – ‘Solo’ – brought only tens of millions of income rather than hundreds, as expected, especially by Disney, so now Disney & SW are keeping a low profile as they are possibly figuring out what to do without appearing to be submitting to the fans’ desires of – whatever they want, for that would be a bad weakness, you know? Of course, this is also how democracy works – the people want something and they force it out of their politicians – but these days in real life USA has issues with democracy too, so let’s leave Disney & SW be… for now.

Back to Netflix? With ‘Insatiable’ and maybe similar TV series/movies/etc., they are trying to do what Disney did with SW, only go further and subvert the tropes in new ways. This actually will not be new, as the semi-reboot of ‘Heathers’, (appearing on various TV outlets earlier in July 2018), has already done – and it is already meeting with disapproval…which hadn’t stopped it from being aired, not entirely. Donald and his presidential achievements come to mind – they too are met with disapproval, and it had not stopped them, not entirely. How is that for a discussion topic on the U.S. society?

Back to Netflix again? As we discussed at the beginning, ‘Insatiable’ doesn’t come across very fat-positive; neither does Sierra’s series, but there Netflix isn’t subverting the tropes, but rather playing them in an old-fashioned way, and as a result that series is already being compared to ‘Insatiable’ in a favorable manner. Good for them…perhaps this is all a plot by Netflix to boost Sierra’s ratings for this and the future installments, while dropping ‘Insatiable’ off post-S1, (or sometime around that). In that case, where does it leave Debbie Ryan and the rest of her droogs? Probably pissed-off at Netflix and looking for some revenge.

More likely, however, is that Netflix is venturing into an unknown territory without a map and already getting some things wrong. That is not a problem, all they still need to do is to figure out when to cut their losses and retreat, or at least – re-think their strategy, just as Disney & SW might be doing right now. Otherwise, Netflix will arrive where Disney &SW currently are – in a position where they seem to be losing money rather than anything else.

Again, this is not exactly new territory for Netflix, as their misadventure with the ‘Gilmore Girls’ indicates – sometimes they actually do not succeed and need to do something. When the ‘Gilmore Girls’ reboot didn’t succeed, they quietly shelved any potential follow-ups, while ASP is currently running a different TV series entirely – and a successful one, just as the reboot was not. Sometimes all you need is to end something and start an entirely new thing instead. Good luck to her.

And equally good luck to Netflix with ‘Insatiable’, too. I don’t know what is going on with the series – maybe ‘Insatiable’ is going to be a great series and what we have here is just a badly made trailer – but until it comes forth, (August 10, 2018), we’ll just have wait to see how it develops.

This is it for this time; see you all soon.