Mr. Mxyzptlk
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Posts posted by Mr. Mxyzptlk
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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)
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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.
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.
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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.
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haven't finished listening to it yet, but i have to say...
i still think Mean Seasons is an awesome episode.
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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.
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It's not necesserily lazy storytelling as it is a troupe of conventional sci-fi drama. That's like saying someone becomes a hero to A)Avenge the deaths of loved ones I.E. Batman or Spider-Man or B) Atone for past mistakes I.E. Iron Man, Dr. Strange or Spider-Man is lazy storytelling. It's just a typical convention.
So you can not like the story or how it shows J'onn's deep pain at the loss of his wife and children, but it doesn't make it any less valid in the slightest. Again, it's not like he lost a girlfriend or anything. His WIFE and CHILDREN. Even still, again at the end, he proved to be morally just enough to put his desires aside to save the day. It's fine if you don't like how they did it, but it doesn't invalidate the story in terms of whether or not it needed to be told.
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.
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(The JLU Superman episode, while good, revealed nothing new about him either)
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.
And really, he's not that similar to Batman and Superman when it comes down to it. Batman has Mommy and Daddy issues due to the age he lost them and the way he lost them. Superman grew up on Earth, so his plight is little more than the conflict of any orphan who grows up in a foster home. J'onn knew his family. He knew his people. He saw them die and lived with it for many many years. He sees no purpose in life besides fighting alongside the league on a planet he's relatively new too. So when the very thing that defined his character and shaped who he was is shoved and dangled in his face, real or not, it's understandable for him to be tempted and nearly succumb. The point of the episode is that he didn't in the end, not that he almost did. In terms of the character's development, the ends justify the means.
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.
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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.
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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.
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Legends is my favorite of the season. expecting great things.
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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.
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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
And you are now officially my hero.
haha thanks. film is my official hobby.
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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
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i fail to see what is particularly innovative or amazing about the opening of Gladiator aside from the fact that it's a big-budget Hollywood battle sequence. i'd much rather the immersive multi-camera setup of a Kurosawa battle scene ala The Seven Samurai or the experimentation in film scoring of the battle on the ice in Eisenstein's Alexander Nevsky.
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.
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i fail to see what is particularly innovative or amazing about the opening of Gladiator aside from the fact that it's a big-budget Hollywood battle sequence. i'd much rather the immersive multi-camera setup of a Kurosawa battle scene ala The Seven Samurai or the experimentation in film scoring of the battle on the ice in Eisenstein's Alexander Nevsky.
i rather like The Brave and the Bold. i think that like every season one episode, the animation is incredibly stiff and blocky, but it's such an awesome, light story. War World is seriously one of the worst things of all time (can't wait till Superman starts getting good stories in season 2 [Twilight and Hereafter are phenomenal]) and Paradise Lost i think has some of the better storyboarding and direction in its second part. seriously surprised there was no mention of the reused animation from Speed Demons.
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right on about Gladiator. i sort of pride myself on being a movie buff and simply cannot stand that film.
i also echo the praise for Mike's bravura War World recap performance.
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I had a lot of problems with Watchmen, the movie,
the main one being Ozymandias' characterization as a simplified condescending asshole, and his position was made out to be unambiguously wrong, which I found far off from the point of the far more complex graphic novel. Also the excess slo-mo and over-the-top violence really cheapened the film; the book is such a sophisticated work that all the slo-mo shots of thigh blood spurts and elongated fight scenes and disintegrated flesh seemed too much embracing the kind of 'coolness' the book strays from in offering a gritty, realistic, deconstruction of the conventional superhero narrative; in any case it was over-indulgent. Also the destruction of New York had no emotional weight because there was no development of any of the side characters that stand for the common citizen in the book. The fact that the way the film carried out Ozy's plan made more sense doesn't make up for the far lesser emotional and thematic impact/significance. A CGI apocalypse cannot replace Gibbons' phenomenal illustrations.
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I can't tell you guys how happy I am that y'all are finally in JL. Seriously makes me ecstatic.
Will probably post more now that y'all are in familiar territory.
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I think that the series is really iconic and insanely influential (the cartoon certainly would not exist without it), but it doesn't appeal to me. Quite a few people on toonzone and other boards I frequent agree. There are definitely more fans than not, but it's definitely not an uncommon opinion.
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This episode totally makes me anticipate when y'all start doing JL. I still haven't seen any Static, but I'm still enjoying the show. Love the out-takes.
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Um, I'm pretty sure Wolfman has more or less admitted what I just said. I just happen to dislike it. I guess TT continuity talk is taboo around here and more discussed than I thought, but I seriously hope you're not telling me I can't express my opinion on a comic book, especially when it's really not that uncommon of an opinion at all.
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Wolfman and Perez's Titans were awful. They acted just like grown adult heroes but they were technically teenagers. The cartoon actually stays true to the title.
And also, for a last say on the Titans debate, you're right about the Titans East and everything (been a while since I revisited the series), but basically I'm skeptical about anything in Static Shock being evidence of continuity, as all of the crossovers were done for ratings reasons and the show was never originally intended to be in DCAU continuity. There is no true creative collaboration between SS's production crew and Bruce Timm's production crew, and so I take a reference to the Titans as a way of appealing to the kids as opposed to a serious piece of hard evidence.
And that's the thing, I still feel that the burden of proof is on the people arguing that the show is in continuity. All of the evidence is largely debatable or conjectural and not one time has a producer or someone involved in the production of TT said anything to the effect that TT exists in continuity. I feel the people who don't care either way, but I feel to accept it as continuity is to disrupt the relatively realistic tone of the Timm-verse.
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Ok, well since a new generation of Titans was never hinted at in the show Teen Titans, we can just assume, therefore, that the Timm-verse (excluding TT) has its own Titans.
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Dick Grayson and Tim Drake can't both be the Robin of The Teen Titans; I think that was a line that was forced in for commercial reasons and can only be used as proof on the flimsiest of grounds.
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But yeah, how's it going, haven't been by in a while.
Episode 80
in World's Finest Podcast
Posted
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.