'Birds of Prey' trailer 2 - Jan 9

Obligatory disclaimer: real life sucks. There is still sickness in my family, and we all keep on fighting with each other, making sure that we all feel worse. Human beings are complicated, my family is my family, and I hate my life. Ergo, I look for ways to escape it, and what I find is the second ‘Birds of Prey’ (DC Movie) trailer. Yay?

Let me just point it out – I liked the first trailer better, this one seems to be the new old ‘Suicide Squad’ movie with a mostly female cast that seems to be developing into an inferior version of ‘Ocean’s 8’ movie instead. The film in question wasn’t so bad, it just was a reboot slash remake of the original ‘Ocean 11’, just with much more girl power, and just like ‘Charlie’s Angels-2019’ film, (itself a reboot of the 2003 CA film that no one talked about just because, cough), ‘Ocean’s 8’ never developed into anything more, even though it was much more compact, proportionally speaking, than ‘Hellboy-2019, for example. Where were we?

Oh yeah, ‘Birds of Prey’ are in-between Scylla and Charybdis. On one hand, there’s the established ‘Harley Queen’ cartoon for grown-ups, which is already dealing with ‘the fantabulous emancipation of Harley’, literally, among other meanings, but because it is a cartoon series, it can better pace itself and take its’ time to do that, unlike the ‘Birds of Prey’ film, which can’t, because of the differences between a film and a cartoon series. However, on the other hand, today’s trailer, (aka Jan 9), revealed that the film may have problems with its’ own.

First, there is no Poison Ivy. While that is not a problem, it is a disappointment – these days DC comics have made Harley and Ivy practically gay BFFs, if not an outright couple. The HQ cartoon seems to be working in this direction as well; yes, it is taking its’ time, again, but it uses this time to give both Harley and her new crew character development, (not to mention the Bat-family, of course), and it does a good job of it too! We are talking the complete opposite of the old ‘Suicide Squad’ film here. Put otherwise, while Harley is slowly becoming emancipated, (alongside Ivy), Dr. Psycho is becoming less crude and toxically masculine, King Shark is leaning to stand up for himself, a giant anthropomorphic shark or not, and Clayface is beginning to come into his own as well – and at the same time their depictions, initial and derived, are still fairly consistent with those in the DC comics, whereas in the trailer…

In the trailer, we got Harley, who is directly transplanted from her ‘Suicide Squad’ flashback depiction, (cough Jared Leto left DC franchise in a bad way cough), we got Huntress and Black Canary who seem to be only coming into their superhero selves, (not that that’s a problem), we got a bespectacled Renee Montoya, (which is very different from how she is usually depicted in the DC comics), and finally we got Cassandra Cain. In the DC comics, Cass is Batgirl, and one of the most formidable members of Batman’s crew. She is also a mostly silent semi-homeless ninja, because it is comics. Here, in the trailer, she seems to be nothing more than a pickpocket who begins to look up to Harley as the movie develops, (or this is how it looks like in this trailer), someone, who is more like Linus from ‘Ocean’s 11’ or Constance from ‘Ocean’s 8’. Why?

Because DC and co. could, that is why. Fair enough, they own the franchise, they can reboot their characters however they like, but the problem is that it’s not necessarily a good thing either: Disney rebooted the SW franchise after the SW8 film in order to appease the fans – the ‘fan service’ – but the resulted SW9 film wasn’t really an improvement either. Official-unofficial mouthparts for the Big Mouse may claim that the SW fans do not know what they want, but somehow when George Lucas had been in charge, he never had that problem, not even in the prequel trilogy, and everyone knows it. He also – and now it is officially known – did not like the SW9 movie when he saw it, so there is that. SW – or at least its’ sequel trilogy – has ended with a whimper rather than a bang.

This brings us back to the ‘Birds of Prey’ movie. Just as the SW9 movie tried to distance itself from its’ predecessor,  so ‘Birds of Prey’ is setting itself to be apart from both the old ‘Suicide Squad’ movie and its upcoming reboot. The SW9 movie did succeed…just in wrong ways…so who has to say that ‘Birds of Prey’ won’t? DC had a bad run with movies, until ‘Wonder Woman’, and ‘Shazam’, and ‘Aquaman’, and to a lesser extent – with ‘Suicide Squad’. It was not a great movie, but neither was it horrible, so where this leave ‘Birds of Prey’ does is anyone’s guess. If MCU makes great movies, and everything else is second rate, with DCEU it is the other way around – the movies are usually the underdogs in this franchise. Considering that the ‘Harley Queen’ cartoon, (also a part of the DC franchise, remember), is proving that – it is very good, in my opinion – then the ‘Birds of Prey’ film need to struggle twice as much and twice as hard to top it…period. Otherwise, they will end up as the old ‘Suicide Squad’ did – maybe not as a bad movie, but one that is flawed, and mocked for those flaws all the same. Real life – and it includes movie critics, (just look at ‘Cats-2019’) – sucks, remember?

This is it for now; see you all soon!

Doolittle-2020 & etc - Oct 14

Obligatory disclaimer: real life sucks. You may try to alleviate some of this suckage by trying to do something new…but the U.S. government does something entirely different as judging by the Middle Eastern mess. It just is not good, and it makes the situation back in D.C. worse. Is the Donald getting impeached or not? For a while, there were even rumors of Mike Pence being the next Republican president, but this is it. Now there’s the Middle Eastern situation with the Kurds, there’s the story of a police officer shooting an Afro-American woman in her home in Texas, there are rumors of an Epstein-Trump connection, but nothing concrete about the impeachment.

The most likely possibility is that it had died down again. As the recent events showed, the Democrats are not that cohesive themselves as a political unit – the ‘old guard’ and AOC and her ‘new squad’ are not getting along, and there may be other factions inside that party as well. That said, none of them are all that enthused about Mike Pence’s presidency, so that might be an extra motivation for the Democrats to back down from the impeachment push and return to the previous plan: tone down the internal aggression to define and decide as to who’ll be the next presidential candidate for the next election. With the Democrats backing down, so will the Republicans – they don’t care much for the Donald either, but gives them the main advantage against the Democrats for the moment, and so they’re keeping him, if they can and if he continues to provide them the advantage. Otherwise, they will give him the boot themselves, the end. The only end that is left loose are the U.S.’ Mid-East politics, which are left in disarray while the big chiefs back in D.C. resolve conflicts of their own making and pat themselves on the back for doing this, but that is neither here nor there. What is next?

Let us talk about movies instead. ‘Gemini Man’ was expectedly bad unless you are a diehard Will Smith fan; the ‘Addams Family 2019’ was surprisingly good, though the live action ‘Addams Family’ 1991 movie is still the best, in my opinion. That said, the animated 2019 film has clearly been influenced by the live action movie series, (I think it was a trilogy), and did its’ best to capture the Addams family magics, (metaphorically speaking), and it succeeded so yay! Anything else?

There is going to be a ‘Spider-Man meets Venom’ movie after all, so far, there are no discussions of the ‘Addams Family 2019’ film online, (oddly enough), and then there is the ‘Doolittle 2020’ movie trailer. In regards to the latter, what the Hell? It is a hot mess that is almost as bad as the trailer for S1 ‘Insatiable’ Netflix series had been; supposedly, the movie is about the titular character going on a journey to save queen Victoria, (yes, we’re talking about a character based directly on the real-life monarch here) from some mysterious illness after his wife died some time later. An assembly of sidekicks, both human and animal, are assisting him…but the trailer does a bad job of explaining this, all it is so far is a mess of movie action shots that just do not tell a coherent story, nor do they introduce any characters aside from the titular character who is played by Robert Downey Jr., also known as the Iron Stark – sorry, the Iron Man – who gets to ride a CGI ostrich in this movie instead. At least I hope that the ostrich is CGI, because while you can ride a real ostrich in modern times, you will probably be sued by ASPCA or some similar agency afterwards, and I doubt that Disney wants that.

…Disney doesn’t appear to be openly involved with the ‘Doolittle 2020’ movie? Not surprising, because already the movie is off to a bad start, involving massive reshoots and changing dates to avoid conflict with the Disney/SW ‘SW9’ movie, which doesn’t promise anything positive for this particular film. Of course, keep in mind that I, for one, am more used to the Soviet adaptations of the original novel, which got to be very different from the original; in it, the titular character usually goes to Africa to treat some ill monkeys slash apes, encounters an atypical animal called Pushy-Pulley, and becomes an arch nemesis of a pirate leader… it really is a lot more child-friendly and less exciting than how it sounds, but the Soviet cinematography really loved it, and there were several versions of ‘Doolittle’ adaptations during the existence of USSR – cartoons, live-action movies, animated movies, etc. By contrast, in the West, (ok, the U.S.), ‘Doolittle’ adaptations are even more free-style than the Soviet ones were, often going completely off-script, but this is justifiable: in the original novel when the good doctor went down to Africa, for example, he encountered a kingdom of cannibalistic savages…which is really inappropriate for the twenty-first century for all sorts of reason, we all can agree. Even this misbegotten trailer for ‘Doolittle 2020’ movie seems to skip this plotline, though there was a shot of someone who might be this movie’s version of a pirate chief – and we see the Iron Doctor, sorry, the Doolittle Stark – facing-off with a man-eating tiger as well. If ‘Doolittle 2020’ will be able to keep itself together, it can be a really good movie, but otherwise? It risks becoming a mess on par with the ‘Insatiable’ S1, only worse so, since ‘Insatiable’ is a Netflix series, and in S2 it seems to have fixed itself and has become less controversial and edgy and more mainstream instead. ‘Doolittle 2020’ probably will not get the chance to do that via a sequel. Anything else?

The second ‘Frozen II’ movie trailer was mostly all about Olaf and didn’t give anything new regarding the plot of this film, and then there’s the trailer for the upcoming ‘Harley & Ivy’ cartoon series, starring Kaley Cuoco as the voice of Harley Quinn. It is not too coherent either, but it does not need to be – it depicts clearly enough that it will be about Harley breaking up with Joker and becoming her own woman, probably with a romantic plot line involving her and Ivy. The first attempt to team up those two had been back in the 90s, in an episode of Batman: the Animated Series’, where Harley had had enough of Mr. J for once, tried to strike out on her own and ended up teaming up with Ivy instead. The pair had had some fantabulous adventures of their own, though because it was the 90s, there was no Harley/Ivy romance…but from then on, the pair had increasingly more and more girl time together especially in the animated DC works. Ergo, this particular development in the DC cartoons is only natural and expected, but where does it leave the upcoming ‘BP 2020’ movie?

…Potentially high and dry and unrequested, because Harley will already have her fantabulous emancipation in the cartoon series, and the live-action movie will be the 2020’s analogue of the 2016’s ‘Suicide Squad’, where several years of character development in the comics tried to be crammed into a single movie, so is it any surprise that the result was not so much good or bad, but mangled? If it does not work, the 2020 ‘Birds of Prey’ film will end up in the same way, and that would be sad, especially since Jared Leto is already upset that he and his version of Joker was apparently kicked out of DCEU for good. Ah well, maybe he will do a better Morbius in MCU instead.

…This is it for now – see you all soon.