"Justice League" review, part 1: How Infirm a Foundation

I'm not even going to touch the film in this post. I'm just going to explain why it was utterly doomed.

A while back, I wrote "undercutting Snyder with the BvS theatrical cut was the single dumbest thing in this entire attempt at a cinematic universe." Well... no, it wasn't. But at that point, it was the worst thing you could have done.

"That point" being: you've already committed to piggybacking your Big Shared Universe onto Zack Snyder's "The Only Way This Jesus Metaphor Could Be Less Subtle Is If I Released The Film On Easter Weekend," a title only slightly less cumbersome than what the studio ultimately went with. The Extended Cut only softens the blow as to what a train wreck Dawn of Justice is. There is no amount of excess footage that can get around the following problems:

1. Mark Zuckerberg cosplaying as Lex Luthor pulls a goddamn piss prank at a Senate hearing.
2. Batman and Superman team up because their mothers have the same name.
3. Wonder Woman teams up with them because Batman sent her an email.

So I'm just going to come out and say it: using Zack Snyder as the vehicle for your attempt to take on the Marvel juggernaut was a strategic mistake even Napoleon wouldn't have made.

Zack Snyder steps back from JUSTICE LEAGUE

Zack Snyder has decided not to finish the Justice League film after a family tragedy. The film will be finished (by that I mean, pick-up scenes will be written and shot by, and the final editing will be overseen) by Joss Whedon.

Originally, Warner Brothers wanted to push the release date back, but Snyder refused, soldiering on for another two months before realizing that he just couldn't finish the job.

Here are some observations.

1. The stakes for Wonder Woman are now enormous.
When Avengers director Joss Whedon was tapped for Batgirl, my thought was, "oh, no, if Batgirl's the first good DC film, it's going to look like the Snyder/Johns retool didn't work at all and now they've brought in Marvel's most famous director to clean up their mess." Now that Whedon is finishing Justice League, inevitably, anything good about that film is going to be laid at his feet by anti-DC/anti-Snyder folks.

2. Why Whedon? 
Whedon and Snyder have entirely different storytelling methods. I literally cannot imagine Joss Whedon's Watchmen or Zack Snyder's The Avengers. Apparently Whedon was Snyder's choice, which is what makes this tolerable to me, but between this and the studio politicking above, I can't help but feel like now, no matter what happens, Snyder's gonna get nudged aside in the future.

Which is, frankly, a shame. Snyder's not the most popular man in Hollywood, of course, but he has a vision, and Warner needs to either get behind that vision or get a new visionary (undercutting Snyder with the BvS theatrical cut was the single dumbest thing in this entire attempt at a cinematic universe). Now it looks like they're going to go with the latter option by default. Which is sad; if I wanted the Whedon approach, I'd watch Marvel movies.

On an unrelated note, Guardians of the Galaxy 2 is awesome. Wait, I already did that review.

I feel like there's the potential for a post titled X Times Joss Whedon's Shows Would Have Come Under Fire From Anita Sarkeesian But For The Fact That He Gave Her Nerd Cred.

Off the top of my head (spoilers for stuff that's at least 5 years old):

• Turning Willow gay instead of Xander on Buffy, because lesbians are hotter.
• Firefly - while both Mal and River are shown naked, Mal is totally cool with it, but River is all vulnerable.
• Dollhouse. Like, f*cking all of it.
• All of the (mortal) female characters on Angel die, while at least one mortal male character is still kicking at the end of the finale. 

So now that Agents of SHIELD got renewed for a second season, I guess I have to watch it

I don't watch a lot of TV.

No, wait. I don't watch a lot of current TV.

Basically what it is is my stubborn refusal to process a story at a rate of one hour per week. I bought the Battlestar Galactica boxset without having seen a single episode, and it was still one of the best purchases I ever made, meh-tastic ending and all. Buffy, Angel and Firefly were all discovered after they had ended, as were Deep Space Nine, Babylon Five and, of course, classic Doctor Who.  I picked up Game of Thrones between the second and third seasons (after going and reading the books, naturally).

A couple of years ago, when Dollhouse got renewed for a second season I finally started to watch that. I didn't want to bother having another Firefly on my hands, where I got emotionally invested in a story that was then cut cruelly short (...oops). Now Agents of SHIELD is in the same place, and, yay?

In a way I guess it's sort of a sort of vindication. (Sort of a sort? Note to the blogger: you are not Charles Dickens, meaning you're not paid by the word.) I am now free to express interest in a show that was watched by enough people not to get murdered in the crib by the network.  (Or, rather, a show that ties into movies that statistically everyone has seen, and has thus avoided getting murdered in the crib by virtue of being a link to money-printing machines.)

James Reviews: Marvel's The Avengers

Joss Whedon has had a lot of luck/skill (although it's diminished in recent years) getting awesome television shows made. However, his one film prior to this one was essentially a flop, and it's thus rather surprising to me that he got to direct

Let me explain what I mean by that.  Serenity was a film with a pre-established cast who already know each other, who team up to fight an oddly-compelling villain even though most of them end up being cannon fodder, because it's really down to one guy at the end.  Take out the "already know each other" part and that's The Avengers.  Or possibly Marvel's The Avengers, which I feel compelled to call it in order to distinguish it from that show with the spy chick who beat up bad guys while wearing a skintight outfit.

I don't know why I bother trying, though.

Anyway, the film itself is... well, it's not perfect, and a surprising amount of the flaws seem to come in at the script phase.  Joss got his start as a script doctor, patching up other people's messes into something workable (including the original Toy Story(!)), so it's surprising to me that a basically solid concept - a bunch of superheroes come together into a genuine team - had such a muddled execution.

BtVS: Gingerbread

First off, a bit of a foreword, because this marks the beginning of an extended foray into sci-fi/fantasy works that aren't Doctor Who. Whereas Doctor Who is largely episodic, with every serial being largely a self-contained story that you can watch without needing any background information, most of the other shows I'll be looking at aren't. Buffy can at least pretend to be, even though it does have overarching season-long arcs. Angel can't, or at least it has increasing difficulty doing so; it can in Season One, but it certainly can't by Season Four. Firefly can, but only because there are only a handful of threads that got established in its first and only thirteen episodes. The good Dollhouse episodes are arc-centric. Star Trek: Deep Space Nine is largely on the fence, especially as the majority of episodes I want to look at come from the last three seasons. Battlestar Galactica is arc-driven. For this reason, a lot of these reviews, simply as a matter of necessity, won't restrict themselves simply to the content covered in neat 45-minute chunks. In general, these reviews are going to be a lot more tangential than the Doctor Who reviews have been. Likewise, the scoring system is going to be largely scrapped; neither Firefly nor Dollhouse generated enough episodes to really establish a baseline, Angel gets too arc-driven, and I'll be reviewing BSG episodes before I even finish the first season (and it's heavily arc-driven anyway). Therefore, Buffy and DS9 will get numerical scores, Firefly, Dollhouse and BSG won't, and I haven't decided what to do about Angel yet. I'll probably score Seasons 1-3 and 5, and do something different for Season 4. I'll cop the SFDebris line and mention that all scores are relative to that series and that series alone; a Buffy episode that gets an 8 is not automatically better than a Doctor Who episode that got a 7, and vice-versa.

For my first foray into Joss Whedon's most famous and influential show, I've picked an obscure episode from the middle of Season Three. I've chosen this episode because I think it's actually the darkest episode of the show, ever. That may be a high claim considering there was an episode in Season 1 with overtures of child abuse, a few episode of Season 2 that were all about sex, and the entirety of Season 6, which was largely about drugs, but also had gunplay, torture, grisly murder and the infamous attempted rape.

But for me, "Gingerbread" is the darkest Buffy episode for two main reasons. One, the plot is kicked off by the discovery of two dead children. When I reviewed Doctor Who's "Curse of the Black Spot" and complained about how obvious it was that the kid wasn't dead, this episode was one of the first things I thought of. Now, you might be wondering, since I've brought up the issue of dead children, what about the Anoited One? To which I respond, 1) the Anointed One was turned offscreen. 2) It was a very legitimate plot twist - the horrible ubervamp was not the religious nutball but instead the innocent little kid. 3) the Anointed One's death - his permanent one, near the beginning of Season 2 - is there both to establish Spike as the real threat and to dispose of a child actor who was aging when his vampiric character couldn't (strange that this was never a problem for David Boreanaz, who looks remarkably different even in Season Three than he did in Season One, never mind the weight he gained by the time Angel wrapped).

Now, yes, the notion of a demon walking around in a kid's body is creepy as all hell, but really, that explanation of vampirism pretty much left town in the middle of Season Two and never came back. Besides, the Anointed One was still mobile, and his body simply vanished when he was killed a second time. The whole "dead child" angle was not a plot point, not like it is here.

The second reason I think "Gingerbread" is Buffy's darkest episode is because by the end, Buffy's mother is pretty much perfectly willing to burn her own daughter at the stake. Top that.

Anyway, here's the plot in a nutshell: Buffy's mother (who, remember, only found out that her daughter was the Slayer at the end of the last season) watched Buffy fight some evil. They have an awkward conversation - because at this point, the show is still trying to make a point of balancing Buffy's normal life with her Slayer activities, something that either goes out the window or is just done wrong after a certain event midway through Season 5 - and then they discover two dead children with a mysterious mark on them.

It transpires that the mark is related to witchcraft, and so The Adults band together and form an anti-occult group. Problem is, Buffy's best friend Willow is a budding witch. '

I don't know how much of this was planned from the beginning, but here goes: Angel, the vampire with a soul and Buffy's love interest for the first three seasons, was originally created to be the main villain for Season Two. As the second half of Season Two - the "Angelus" arc - got underway, it became obvious to Joss Whedon that David Boreanaz deserved his own show. This much is known; I can only speculate as to whether Angel would have been killed for good at the end of Season Two if they weren't planning on spinning him off. It does seem to me like Willow's magical abilities come out of nowhere, and I'll go into more detail when I actually get to the "Becoming" episodes, but I'd be willing to guess that this episode is at least partially a means of payment for how that arc ended. "Okay, Willow restored Angel's soul and we're seeing the consequences of that for Buffy and Angel... what are the consequences for Willow?"

At any rate, this episode does look at those consequences. At this point in the show, magic is not a metaphor for lesbianism or drug abuse, and this episode would no doubt have been considerably different had it been made after Willow and Tara became an item. Here magic is a stigma all its own, and Sunnydale engages in a literal witch-hunt. And because Buffy has supernatural powers, she's dragged into it, too. That's it. On the supernatural end, there's not a lot of metaphor going on, which is rare for this show. (Well... maybe. The show occasionally reminds us that Willow is Jewish...)

On the adults' side, however... It seems to me like this is a satire of those parents' groups that want to outlaw violent video games and the like - or it could be an analogue to Mothers Against Drunk Driving, which would at least make it more serious. It turns out that the "dead children" are actually ancient demons who thrive on creating these sorts of witch-hunts (and originated in Germany...). Buffy and the gang stop them, "evil" witch Amy gets stuck as a rat for the next three seasons, and everything just kind of eases back to normal. If Buffy ever calls her mother on the whole "you tried to burn me alive thing" after this, I can't remember it.

So the kids aren't really dead, because ha ha, you can't actually kill kids on TV (stay tuned...) It's interesting to note how the show treats dead children as such serious business, and then nods and winks as it reveals that actually a couple of demons are just playing on people's fears. That the adults could be driven into such a frenzy that they're willing to burn three (admittedly troublemaking) teenagers alive does make for some really compelling drama. And to get there, it does need the "a demon made me do it" oomph. The anti-violent-game lot may be a bunch of riled harpies, but they're not going around demanding human sacrifice. With the benefit of hindsight, we can see that this is one of the last "Buffy vs Adults" stories - she's still got her confrontation with the Mayor at the end of the season, and a nebulous government organization after that, but from then on it's either personal crises ("The Body," almost all of Season 6) or direct supernatural threats (Glory, the First).

"Gingerbread" features a threat that I wouldn't have minded seeing more of; a corruptor, a threat that can turn the people you trust against you. I don't mean outright mind-control a la "Bad Eggs" or the entire Jasmine arc on Angel, but rather psychological manipulation, a la the Joker to Harvey Dent in The Dark Knight. I mentioned earlier that maybe "Gingerbread" was a payoff for Willow's sudden magical aptitude in "Becoming." Much more obviously, it's payoff for the Buffy-Joyce plot in "Becoming." Joyce felt betrayed by Buffy because Buffy kept her secret lifestyle from her; in this episode, Joyce betrays Buffy. It's an extra little bit of denoument, crammed in the middle of a season, yes, but it shows that the writers really were thinking about the consequences of every single thing that happened on the show.

"Gingerbread" gets a 6 out of 10. That doesn't mean that it's only 60% good; I like it a lot, but 1) there are many other episodes that are better, and 2) it doesn't have many special qualities. It's dark as all hell, and it's a payoff for stuff that happened earlier, but that's about it.

Thursday: BSG miniseries
Friday: DS9: "In the Pale Moonlight"
Saturday: Buffy: "Becoming"
Sunday: Doctor Who: "The Rebel Flesh/The Almost People"

An explanation

Yes, this blog is called the Daily Dose of Dirty Deeds, and yes, the word "Daily" is most definitely a lie. Usually this is due to either laziness or writers' block, but since I've gotten back from college my internet has been mostly nonexistent.

And with Doctor Who on break this week (for the American audience, at any rate), and with its big summer hiatus coming up, I'm going to broaden my horizons in terms of episode reviews. I started working on Dollhouse reviews a long time ago, but frankly, despite its strong second season, it still seems like the ugly duckling of the Whedon shows for reasons I can't quite put my finger on. Bottom line on that is, they'll come, one day, but not anytime soon.

Before I saw a little something called City of Death, my favorite sci-fi show was Star Trek: Deep Space Nine. It's certainly the only one of the post-TNG shows that has any serious merit. As a point of massive irony, back when I saw television shows as these episodic, self-contained adventures a la TNG, I was hesitant to approach Voyager because I thought it would be too continuity-heavy. As if. Of course, if Voyager had actually stayed true to its remit... well, I'm getting ahead of myself.

Anyway, City of Death turned me on to Doctor Who, both the old and new series. I found out New Who was heavily influenced by Buffy, which encouraged me to check out all of Joss Whedon's shows. After burning through Buffy and Angel, I moved on to Firefly, eager to see how my newest hero would do science fiction.

And of course I was completely blown away. By now continuity had become second nature to me, and instead of thinking of a season as 22 45-minute films, I thought of a season as one super-extra-long film (DS9's arcs in its last few seasons probably helped). But with all the clever writing, I felt on some level - not that I could put my finger on it - that something was missing. Perhaps because I'm so obsessed with Doctor Who, I never thought about what could be done in a show with the tone of DS9 and the style of Firefly...

...yeah, I finally got around to starting in on Battlestar Galactica.

So what's coming up in the near future is: a few classic Who Reviews, maybe a Buffy episode or two, and then I'll start in on the first season of BSG. Stay tuned; if my internet holds up, I really will be on every day this week.

Oscars? I Do Not Care

Full disclosure: I haven't seen either The King's Speech or The Social Network. Nor do I intend to see either. Ever.

The two films are glorified documentaries, based on real events and real people. I make a point not to watch glorified documentaries, especially when I can just read a history book instead.

There are two points I need to make immediately. One, a glitzy heartless CGI-fest is not going to win any critical support from me, and two, that doesn't mean that I refuse to watch films that incorporate historical events; The Good, the Bad and the Ugly, one of the greatest films ever made, was set (with admittedly only marginal accuracy) in the American Civil War, while Apocalypse Now was set in Vietnam. But neither of these were about the historical events; both films merely used the war as a backdrop for the main characters' adventure. The brief to these films' writers was certainly more than "go look up event X in a history book, glorify it a bit, put in a romantic subplot and turn it into a 100-page script."

Now before I forget, Apocalypse Now was based on a novel, and I've got a whole rant about that coming. But Apocalypse Now is significantly divorced from its source material. Unlike, say, Harry Potter, you don't need to read the novel to have half an idea as to what's going on.

Anywho, I thought I'd go ahead and unleash my own version of the Academy Awards. But since honestly Hollywood's output is generally so pathetic, I decided that just focusing on one year would be a pointless exercise. Instead, I'm going to go ahead and list my favorite science-fiction films from the past decade.

Why science fiction? Why not every genre? Well, because outside of science-fiction (and fantasy, but see Disqualification #1), you have The Dark Knight, Toy Story 3, and well, that's about it.

So before I get to naming the big three, let me get some impressive disqualifications out of the way first.

Disqualification #1: The Lord of the Rings Trilogy
Wait, am I serious? Yes, yes I am. While The Lord of the Rings was awesome in every way, it also taught kids that they no longer need to read. Am I being petty? Yes. Yes I am. The music was awesome and the visual effects represented the greatest technological leap forward since an Imperial Star Destroy zoomed over our heads back in 1977. So let's praise LOTR for what it accomplished, but let's not kid ourselves into thinking that it was anything more than an expensive adaptation of an already-existing story.

Disqualification #2: The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy
Even if this hadn't been one of the worst movies I'd actually convinced myself to see this decade, I'd still disqualify it for the exact same reasons as I did The Lord of the Rings. It's an adaptation with bells on. No prize.

I thought about disqualifying all the Star Wars prequels and The Matrix sequels because they aren't self-contained stories, but rather stories split up over multiple movies to sell more tickets and, in Star Wars's case, toys. But they all pretty much sucked, so there.

And now, the list.

Honorary Mention: Star Trek
Star Trek without Shatner? Blasphemy! Well, I mean, TNG and DS9 pulled it off (insert abuse towards Voyager and Enterprise here), so...

What helped this movie tremendously was a) the fact that the writers obviously cared about their source material and weren't just milking it for a quick dime, and b) Leonard Nimoy. What hurt this movie was, well, it didn't really have a heart. The character who gets the biggest Emotional Grief Moment is, well, Spock. Who is an alien. Who's not supposed to show emotions. The film was essentially a glitzy CGI shoot-em-up, but done with enough loving nods to the original show and films (though I do have to say that seeing this film first and knowing what Kirk does with the Kobayashi Maru scenario kind of wrecks part of The Wrath of Khan) to forgive it.

Star Trek was leagues better than the last two Next Generation films, the Star Wars prequels, or the Matrix sequels. But it paled in comparison to each of the next three, which are all so good it was honestly hard to rank them.

Third Place: Wall-E
I adored this film. It's not based on a previous film, novel, comic book, television show, or candy wrapper, so go it. The reason it comes in third is because I felt it was just a tad heavy-handed. Yes, it's a kid's movie so it can't exactly be subtle. But remember the original Toy Story? There were jokes in there that kids didn't get, or at least shouldn't have gotten ("laser envy," anyone?) What I'm saying is that there was stuff for adults in there too. The closest we got with this film was a HAL-9000 knockoff, which admittedly clued us in pretty quickly to who the villain was going to be.

Second Place: Serenity
Yes, not even my die-hard Whedonist sympathies can keep this film in the number-one slot. Much like Wall-E, it's got a heart and a message, and it isn't too subtle either; you can practically hear the teacher at the beginning say "we've got free health care! Whether you want it or not!" Nevertheless, Whedon went out of his way to not make his villains stereotypical space Nazis. "The Alliance is not the Evil Empire," indeed; it's just a bunch of well-intentioned extremists. Not unlike today's politicians. My only real complaint about it is that it works somewhat less as a standalone film than it does as a series finale to Firefly. Still, in the competition of "Feature Films Based on Television Shows," this one trumps Star Trek, a film that had about 3-4 times Serenity's budget. Admit it: you cared a lot more when Wash got skewered then you did when Vulcan did the big firework.

First Place: Inception
Inception ranks first on my list partly because, while I'm a diehard Whedonist and was thus inclined to overlook Serenity's shortcomings, I actually went into Inception prepared to pick it apart as The Matrix with just a slightly different premise. I was biased against it, but I came out quite liking it. Yes, it's a spectacle, but it also presents an unfolding and deeply captivating story. It's not hard to believe that this film was a decade in the making; from my perspective, it seems to have more in common with Memento than The Dark Knight. This film rates above the other two because: there's no obnoxious message being beaten into you with a sledgehammer, there's no need to watch 14 hours of supplementary materials to get the whole story, and the main character is truly three dimensional, as opposed to a love-struck mime or a version of Han Solo that actually does shoot first.