Mr. Mxyzptlk

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The New Guy

The New Guy (1/8)

  1. yeah Date With Destiny is one of the best episodes of the series. A perfect embodiment of everything that makes this show fun: wildly inventive unpredictable story that meshes superhero cliches with teenage drama tropes, gorgeously animated fight scenes and hilarious poses/facial expressions, and just an all around zesty, entertaining package that is everything this show is supposed to be. i feel like calling it out for being absurd is pretty much missing the entire point. that's what this series is all about.
  2. I don't know if you figure it out later in the podcast but Maria Canals, voice of Hawkgirl, voiced Livewire. and Corey Burton, voice of Brainiac, did Toyman (and i believe two other characters)
  3. Look at the way it's animated. Compared to other DCAU / Justice League fights, it's sloppy. Well I haven't seen this episode in a while (but I've seen it several times), but given that the first season of JL is the poorest, blocky, clunky, most sloppily animated thing in the DCAU I'm hard-pressed to believe that the climactic fight of Secret Society, which is insanely fast, kinetic, and as I recall fluid, is worse.
  4. Whoa whoa whoa I can take all the gripes, but I cannot accept the gripes with the final fight. I think it's possibly the best group fight so far because it's not so staged and clean and everyone is perfectly paired off and all that. It is chaotic, people are constantly moving in and out of frame, there is no clear focus, and it's insanely frantic. It's one of the closest JL gets to TT style group fights and it's possibly my favorite thing about the episode.
  5. haven't finished listening to it yet, but i have to say... i still think Mean Seasons is an awesome episode.
  6. 8 1/2, Rashomon, Rififi.... as much as I despise popularly conditioned film canons, works such as these have no reason being remade in easily digestible Hollywood packages for easy money.
  7. Troupes and cliches are fine to get things out of the way and basically and expediently establish characters, but to construct a two-part episode and character exploration on an oft-told conventional story is lazy. It's not that it's necessarily incredulous (though the over-dramatization I feel renders it as such), it's that it is unnecessary, non-revelatory, by-the-numbers, and impossible to generate the suspense the episode so desperately pines for. Just because it was a dream in FTMWHE doesn't mean his behavior within the dream is not to be taken as something sincere or telling about his character. The way in which he was messed with, by being offered a fake world is hardly different from J'onn's being offered fake visions of his past. Except in Superman's case he isn't completely awash in glittery over-idealized dream sequences and interacts with his false environment like a real person and it is one of the closest examples there is to humanizing the character and making him introspective, and even if it isn't essential to continuity it is very much a meaningful episode. And finally, in J'onn's case, it is an extremely idealized past, unless we're to believe that his wife and children really did just look at him smiling and being hyperbolically happy like one-dimensional abstractions. Even if I could buy J'onn being off-put by the visions, the story is too phonily told, too much a carbon copy of every other generic telling of it for it to be remotely engaging or suspenseful.
  8. i disagree with this. it offered a glimpse into the life of Kal-El within an idealized home environment, showing how Superman might act without being on guard or under certain pretenses. i agree that the three are extremely different, but in the sense that J'onn is tempted by an idealized past in the most straightforward way possible that would offer a removal of a defining tragedy, he really is interchangeable with Superman and Batman. the temptation offered here is offered so seductively, straightforwardly, and non character-specifically (i agree with you, but the episode is so bad about convincingly conveying J'onn's inner tragedy that his wide-eyed drooling is so damn generic) that it really isn't any different from what the Black Mercy did to Superman or Batman in For the Man Who Has Everything.
  9. I don't really care how much he loved his family (even if they are cardboard happy cut-outs in the visions), because the whole falling for seduction only to heroically overcome it at the end is generic by-the-numbers lazy storytelling and says nothing about J'onn except that a) he misses Mars and b) he's heroic, easy inferences to make already.
  10. the thing with J'onn in Knight of Shadows is so awful and the fact that he keeps falling for the temptation is only part of the problem. the real problem is that you have a character as potentially rich as J'onn, and the only thing you can do to pose a conflict for him is to hypnotize him with memories of his past in the most cliched 'J'onn, oh J'onn, it's your wife and your kids! etc. etc.' that feels so strained and out of a bad movie. it provides nothing insightful about his character whatsoever, because it's such a cliched, predictable scenario that doesn't appeal to any specific facet of J'onn's character besides the fact of his tragic past, in which case he's interchangeable with Batman or Superman. i kind of see it as J'onn's Perchance to Dream or For the Man Who Has Everything, except those episodes were not only character-specific, but they had narrative and thematic depth. this was just an endless series of pretty fantasies repeating themselves over and over again and it's overbearing and unconvincing.
  11. Legends is my favorite of the season. expecting great things.
  12. i think that JL season one is easily the worst in all of the DCAU. this is one of the few times i would applaud James and Mike for their meticulous exposure of continuity/logic flaws and such because they really grate here. also worst animation in the DCAU besides the B:TAS episodes animated by AKOM, and the color palette is insufferably bland. of course JL season two then becomes one of the greatest things of all time, so it's forgivable.
  13. And you are now officially my hero. haha thanks. film is my official hobby.
  14. Since Christmas Silent Ozu Eclipse Set Eric Rohmer's Six Moral Tales Two-Lane Blacktop The Passion of Joan of Arc Wings of Desire Late Spring Nashville The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance Short Cuts Meet Me in St. Louis Ali: Fear Eats the Soul
  15. I can take or leave the action in that film. Its nice to see an update on those battle sequences but it isn't what makes the film. The important stuff is the relationships between Maxiumus, Marcus Aurelius and Commodus. That's what makes it worth watching. That and the classic gravelly-voiced quote- "My name is Maximus Decimus Meridius, commander of the Armies of the North, General of the Felix Legions, loyal servant to the true emperor, Marcus Aurelius. Father to a murdered son, husband to a murdered wife. And I will have my vengeance, in this life or the next." it's been forever since i've seen the film, but what sticks out to me are irritating frame-rate fluctuations in battle-scenes, an overall sense of bland, beige coloration and overuse of hard lighting to intensify the extent to which the film is an epic drama to the point of excess, and just the general over-archetyping of traditional dramatic character types. the line you quote is to me a primary example of lame, calculated and melodramatic Hollywood screenwriting. i can see why the mass audience of casual moviegoers loves it; i just absolutely can't buy that it has any notable importance in the context of film history. the film wouldn't be nearly as beloved if not for the [unconvincing] action sequences and excessive machismo of Russel Crowe.