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Wonder Woman 1984


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On 11/20/2020 at 2:59 PM, Darth Krawlie said:

Honestly hadn’t even thought of that. I mean it’s a thing we do once in a while but haven’t needed to on any sort of regular basis. You might be onto something here.

I cast to my roku.  Just make sure the roku and phone are on the same network.

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  • 3 weeks later...

slck6h6.jpg

 

[spoiler]

  • I don't really know what to think of it! It reminded me of a line attributed to a recently freed Soviet dissident who said upon leaving a showing of Superman (1978) that he had no idea if the movie he'd just seen was for children or adults. Even more so than usual for the genre that felt true for this sequel.
  • Pedro Pascal's performance in the first half of the movie is extraordinary. Just a deeply unheimlich affect to him.
  • WE DID NOT SEE THE COFFEE CO-WORKER GUY FROM THE BEGINNING RENOUNCE HIS WISH FOR A CUP OF COFFEE. (Also, Diana used her inherited invisibility powers to make a coffee cup disappear. What!? What does coffee mean to this movie? I understand what planes mean, I understand what her lasso means, I understand what the opening flashback sequence means, I just don't get what the coffee means. What terrible price did Barbara and Diana's co-worker have to pay for that cup of coffee he got? Why did they make the one thing Diana tested her new power on a coffee cup? Does it tie into the FBI guy's offer to Kristen Wiig?)
  • My expectations were really quite low for a Wonder Woman movie but one thing I was just not expecting, like, at all and in any way was that it'd turn out to be a soft set-up for a Metamorpho flick!? Simon Stagg just has no luck when it comes to magic rocks! They keep messing up his life! First they take his fortune and soon they'll completely fashmutz his prospective son-in-law! Magic rocks, the bane of his existence! (Or maybe there's something bigger at work here. Katana was in Suicide Squad (2016), after all! The numbercrunchers and trendsetters at the tippy top of the business know what the kids of today want; they want a bigscreen adaptation of Mike W. Barr's Outsiders team and they won't settle for anything less! They're gagging for it! They want to see Geo-Force, they want to see Halo!)
  • The movie makes a big deal out of keeping Diana's existence a secret at the beginning and through the middle. She's using her boomerang tiara to knock out security cameras and telling little Egyptian kids to keep shtum about herself. And then the movie ends with dramatic worldshifting events and Diana personally addressing the world entire!? I don't get it. I think once you've got the latter you don't keep the former, just ditch those lines and those beats.
  • Geoff Johns, what is your deal with Maxwell Lord? First you go out of your way to make him a bad guy, deep down, in Countdown to Infinite Crisis (2005) and now you go out of your way to make him a good guy, deep down, in WW84 (2020)!? Pick a lane, buddy! Or why not have Pedro Pascal play Morgan Edge instead? Pretty sure there must have been a draft of this screenplay where the guy was Morgan Edge, not Max Lord, because of the important role a GBS plays in the final act and how that guy's deal is being a multi-millionaire with ties to supernormal forces. I guess, in a sense, the movie's climax does give Max Lord telepathic abilities. I don't know.
  • Did Diana kill anyone in this movie? Wait, did anybody die in this movie who wasn't already dead? I guess that drunk wannabe rapist maybe got a few years cut short from his life with the kicking he got from Kristen Wiig but other than that this was kind of a fatality-free flick.
  • WAIT DIANA IS A RAPIST SHE TOTALLY BOINKED THAT GUY JUST BECAUSE HE WAS UNDER A WISH-POWERED DELUSION THAT HE WAS CHRIS PINE. That guy didn't have a choice! That was not respectful of his bodily autonomy! This movie takes place in 1984! That guy could've had AIDS! (Wait, did he? This is a story about a woman in the eighties who has sex with her pilot ex and then she starts to lose her strength and suddenly her perfect skin is getting these unsightly bleeding blemishes.) (This maybe brings to mind the half-remembered Chuck Klosterman point about how any guy faced with a choice between all his buddies thinking he'd boinked the most beautiful woman in the world but really he didn't would rather have that happen than to boink the most beautiful woman in the world but have no one know about it, not even yourself. Would that guy be okay with it? I don't know.) But, seriously, look at the outré variety on display in this guy's wardrobe! Look at his commitment to personal fitness! Look at the size of his apartment in the nation's capital! That guy was an unmarried upper-class white guy in his late30s/early40s living alone in Washington in the mid-eighties, that guy owned those kinds of clothes and a stationary bike, you're telling me that guy was straight!? Even his polite conversation with Diana in the movie's dénouement reads a v. particular way to me! He doesn't hit on her! He doesn't ask her out after she compliments the way he's dressed! Does he just assume she's married?
  • Omigosh! Wait! It's not just a sex thing! Diana & Steve make a mutual decision to have this guy STEAL A PLANE and ASSAULT EGYPTIAN SOLDIERS and INVADE THE WHITE HOUSE!? Six months later when everything dies down and people come to their senses this guy is going to get visit after visit from multiple federal agencies and eventually end up remanded into foreign custody. "I don't remember doing any of that stuff, man" isn't going to cut it as an excuse! His prints are on the gun, on the steering wheel, all over the Smithsonian's hangar!
  • There's a scene early on where we see Diana's apartment and I think there was maybe a photograph of Diana liberating a concentration camp? Did that happen? Was it a photograph from WWI times or WWII times? I know there was one with her and an older Etta Candy. But I remember specifically seeing the trademark striped pyjamas which read as WWII-era concentration camp outfits to the popular imagination. I guess I can always just watch the movie again and check.
  • Wait if Lynda Carter has been walking the earth since the beginning of human history why didn't she stop all the different times the magic wish rock has completely collapsed human civilizations? Why didn't she stop David Thewlis in the first movie? Does she care about us? Is it just a thing where she'll keep a telephone pole from killing a baby and explain how she did it so long as it all doesn't take up too much of her time?
  • Wait, the movie opened with voiceover but closed with Diana just repeating the words 'Many, many things." to herself over and over!??????
  • They come to Lord's office and all of it is covered in dust but the SFX work didn't sell that during the scene where the magic wish stone transfigures itself into Lord's body! Oh well!
  • Egypt! Was it supposed to be Kahndaq instead? I mean, Geoff John has done plenty of stuff with Ancient Egypt in, like, his JSA run. So maybe it was always going to be Egypt all along. But outside of a few shots of the pyramids I don't see how it makes sense for it to be Egypt, like, at all.
  • Gal Gadot and Lynda Carter both refer to Themyscira not by name but as "my culture". Did they worry about losing people with a little dob of lore in their sequel? It avoids the possibility of inconsistent pronunciation, maybe, but hey, everyone's Amazon accent sounds different in every movie so far so why bother? It kind of makes sense for Lynda Carter to call it that, she's undercover, (and why were her eyes green in the lasso flashback? Lynda's eyes are blue, they're blue when she shows up onscreen for her dumb dumb cameo, did her eyes change over the centuries?) but Gal Gadot was talking to Chris Pine when she referred to the writing on the wishstone remnant as being from "my culture". He knows about Amazon Island! He knows it's Themyscira!
  • I think tonally it's going for something a little different than most other superhero movies nowadays and it kind of fell flat on its face doing it.
  • So long and yet so clear they've reshuffled some of the scenes and deleted one or two necessary ones. Kristoferr Polaha (who was the psycho rich kid who Angel rescued from hell and whose touch made men misogynist according to, hah, Joss Whedon's particular pet theories of what misogyny consists of; and was also on Mad Men for a few episodes as a Draper neighbour; oh and this isn't even his first time playing a bifurcated consciousness in a DCU property because he was the Nightwing manqué Darkstrike on an episode of Birds of Prey and his other half there was the Alien Bounty Hunter from X-Files) shows up on screen and Gal Gadot's line to him is something like, "I told you before. Stop bothering me!", great, movie, just great. Real solid work! The reshuffling is there when Kristen Wiig has already been established as having lost essential portions of her humanity but when we see her next she's helpful over the phone and her wardrobe in those shots still reads as part of her earlier ensemble.
  • The action was incoherent but ... pleasingly??? so. I liked the way it all looked! It's fun to watch the lasso swing her about, grab onto things, there's a certain appeal to just seeing these things happen in broad daylight with only a few ragdoll simulacrums of the human form on screen at the same time. Of course the final fight ruins that by having it happen at night time, but, well, nothing gold can stay.
  • The biggest and best of it was probably Diana and Steve limping through a world gone mad with suffering and then her finally choosing to do what's right, healing herself painfully by running towards a confrontation with evil after verbally condemning her lover to nonexistence, that was my favourite part of the movie.
  • Wonder Woman lies about not having a TV because it turns out she has, like, nine TVs. Just another moment underscoring the power of capital-T Truth!!!
  • I just got it that part of why Cheetah is Cheetah (instead of anyone else from Wonder Woman's rogues' gallery? rogues gallery? does it come w/a possesive s or not? rogues's gallseries?) is because she's a cheater. The movie is about how it is wrong to cheat and that's why Cheetah is in it and learns her lesson by having Diana beat her up while wearing the Kingdom Come (1995) armour and then getting electrocuted a little.
  • I don't know. I kind of liked it! It was like watching a Bronze Age comic brought to life before my eyes. Like something penned by Elliot S! Maggin. So hokey, so earnest, the sneering tone of so many modern blockbusters is almost entirely absent from it. Diana doesn't really quip, doesn't really undercut the reality of what we're seeing in order to establish it's happening for the audience, she accepts what's before her and sincerely asks questions of other characters to which she expects answers. On that level alone it's missing what tends to annoy me about a lot of big make'em'ups, the stuff that smoothes things out for everyone else knocks me off kilter.

 

 

SLAVOJ ŽIŽEK IMITATION: And zho we zhee that thish izh pure ideology! Diana and Steve refuse to let the Lacanian wishstone work its magic on the world of materialism, this 80s world, and zho on. They thus doom us all to our modern neo-liberal hellscape! For if the wishstone can reorder our minds, reorder our politics, reorder the very natural world itself then it can zhurely of course deal with the consequences of nuclear fallout? It can zhurely turn each and every one of these ICBMs to dust? We have seen it can restore the dead! Yezh, of course, the wishstone exacts a cost. Thizh is trivially true! But so does our modern world! And the costs of our modern world are quite zhevere! Diana and Steve live in 1984, which is but five years after the first World Climate Conference in Geneva and a mere four years before James Hansen's testimony to the Yew Ezzh Congress! The cosztsz of climate change can not be merely wished away with the Themysciran citrine now that Diana has chosen this course of action! There is no golden armour we can adopt to defeat it! Czivilizationzhs rize and czvilizationhs fall! This izh the natural way of the world! Diana & Steve appear to break thizh cycle of history but thizh izh, of course, an illusion! There is no way for uzh to live outzhide of history! They have only doomed us to a worse fate by far. We do not live in 1984. *sniff*. We live in 2020.

tldr = There was the one in 2017,  there was Batman v Superman: Dawn of Justice, there was Justice League, there was this one. I have definitely seen four movies with Gal Gadot as Wonder Woman in 'em. So if this movie is WW84 what am I missing? Does the upcoming Snyder Cut count as another movie? Seventy nine? Math's never been my strong suit. Oh, wait, ImdB tells me that the full title is Wonder Woman : 1984. I better get busy tracking down those one thousand nine hundred additional movies!

[/spoiler]

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23 hours ago, R.CAllen said:

Kristoferr Polaha (who was the psycho rich kid who Angel rescued from hell and whose touch made men misogynist according to, hah, Joss Whedon's particular pet theories of what misogyny consists of

Oops! He's not actually that specific guy! He played that guy's cousin! He explains to Angel, the vampire from Angel ('99-'04), what that guy's deal was around a pool table!

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  • 3 weeks later...
  • 3 months later...

Saw it this weekend with my sister for the first time. It was okay. The people who say it's just Diana doing hokey stuff to protect the world throwbacks are spot on. Very different from other super hero films that have a kind of true evil bad guy. 

And yes, rape-ey-ness ew.

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I enjoyed it, I didn’t think it was amazing. I appreciated it for the throwback it was apparently intended to be. I liked that it took what male protagonists have been allowed to do, applauded for, made box office with, and had a female do it and deal with it. Arnold can ride a horse in a mall, Diana can swing around one. Gene Hackman’s Luthor can snark and absurdly sink California, Pedro Pascal’s Lord can dazzle and wish himself to superiority. Superman can suddenly fly around the Earth to turn back time, Diana can certainly talk the world back to its senses. I also thought it carried commentaries grounded within the setting and appropriate in the tone of the film.

In regards to the use of unwitting people, it is awkward that 84 is derided yet WandaVision is applauded. Their grief arcs are almost identical as well. Also the unwitting person, specifically Fashion Bro in 84, is a standard fantasy concept that displays the unwitting isn’t “there” anymore, it’s Quantum Leap, Freaky Friday etc. To apply horribleness to this concept is totally valid for discussion, even important in that regard about explaining consent to the ignorant, but for an observer to ignore the intention and the well defined trope just so an observer can position themselves as superior and essentially shout cancel is probably equally as important to ponder about… Especially in a society that screams context matters.

In short, and to crib from Max Lord, “The film is good, but it could be better.”

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Thought it was mostly garbage and far below the precedent WW1 set. But Kristen Wig was surprisingly quite sexy and interesting in the role as Cheetah. I'm usually salivating over Gal but Wig got my attention. That 80's hair metal hair...

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