I can’t decide how much I hate the cape they have Tyler Hoechlin wearing as Superman in Supergirl. I also can’t believe that sentence makes sense, but it does. I mean, do I just hate the costume? Or does it need more than that? They also got rid of the briefs, which adds to the overall suck. I might just hate it, but then again it’s possible that I shouldn’t just hate it and despising it is a better use of my time. I’m really having trouble calibrating my dislike here.
Then again:
Granted, they’re not actually using the Williams score (which I think of as the “right” score) but maybe I can forgive them.
At some point last night at OtherJob I wrote an entire blog post in my head. I was pretty convinced it was a good one, too. Now it’s 10 AM Sunday morning and the only thing I’ve managed to achieve is a cup of coffee and a shower and I have no idea what in the world I might have gotten into my head to write about.
Let’s grab-bag a couple of things.
1) I think I’ve talked about this before, but I have no intention of purchasing or reading Go Set a Watchman. I never believed that she actually wanted the book published (this interview with her “editor,” a man who claims he doesn’t know if the book was ever edited and apparently doesn’t realize that planes exist, is terrifyingly shady) and from what I’ve seen from people who have read it, I stand by that decision.
2) The recent footage from Comic-Con from Batman V. Superman has, for the first time, made that movie at least a tiny bit interesting. I like the idea that Batman’s vendetta against Superman is rooted in losing people in Metropolis when Superman destroyed it. The shot of Bruce Wayne charging into the onrushing cloud of dust from the collapsed building is great. (Superheroes? Saving people? Crazy!) Unfortunately, Snyder’s Superman is still a useless, preening dick and in addition to the character assassination of Pa Kent in Super Powered Outer Space Alien 1 he’s now going after Ma Kent in 2. This continues to be deeply “no thank you” but at least there’s something interesting about it now.
Hmm. I guess two is a couple. I’m kind of going nuts over here; my lack of ability to be on vacation and the find-a-job stress is sorta starting to get to me a little. I expect to be found in the basement chewing on my underwear within a week or so.
You remember when your grandpa used to call movies that? And it was a weirdly redundant phrase, but also oddly comforting? I miss pitcher shows.
Anyway. You’ve seen this already:
I had a few things to say about the first trailer, both right after I saw it and after I had some time to think about it. My main concern, right now, is that the movie’s going to end up being a bit too scary to take my four-year-old to, and taking Kenny to see this movie is literally the main reason I want to see it. That image yesterday wasn’t a joke. Now, most of the scary scenes seem to be confined to John Boyega’s Finn character, so I’m hoping that it’s just a few bits from early in the movie. But look at this:
The bloody handprint– or at least what looks like one– on his helmet has me a bit nervous. This is a series that managed to burn three characters to a crisp and cut off multiple limbs without getting bloody. I’m not making doom and gloom proclamations, mind you– it just makes me a teeny bit less likely to take my son to see it. It’s not going to affect whether I do.
(Note: I don’t know whether Finn is in costume for these bits or if he’s actually a Stormtrooper. I kinda like the idea of a main character being a former Stormtrooper.)
On the good side, and this isn’t in the trailer, there’s this:
This is the hilt of Kylo Ren’s cross-guarded lightsaber, which caused so much kvetching when the first trailer came out. I was not happy with the new look for the lightsaber blade (not the crossguards, the blade itself) and said that I’d drop my objection if there seemed to be a story-based reason why the blade looked different.
That saber hilt looks like it was put together by an amateur. And I note that Kylo Ren’s name does not include the word Darth. Therefore: objection dropped.
Everything else about the trailer? Gold. I’m not super keen on the idea of the Empire and the Rebellion being renamed the First Order and the Resistance, but I’ll roll with that for the time being and it’s not in the trailer anyway. But yeah, I’m a lot more psyched about this film now than I was for the first teaser.
On the other hand…
Nope.
Noooooope.
One of these days they’ll make a new Superman movie. Hell, one of these days they’ll make a Batman movie; they haven’t made one of those in like two decades or something. Make all the movies you want about Angsty Alien No Moral Core Raised by Assholes Dude and Snarling Ninja Bat-Costume Dude, but stop calling those two “Superman” and “Batman.” Wild fucking dogs couldn’t drag me to see this shit.
(“But, Luther, you were down on the new Star Wars before the second trailer came out, and you seem to have changed your mind! What makes these different?”)
The entirety of the Nolan Batman films and the horrid piece of shit that was Man of Steel. Ain’t nothing gonna change in this one.
(“How dare you judge an entire movie on a two-minute trailer!”)
Can we change the subject for a sec and talk about how fucking stupid this is as a line of argument? Trailers literally only exist to make people want to see things. They exist to make people judge movies. They’re put together by the same people who put the movies together. It’s bullshit to say that you can watch a trailer and go “I want to see that!” but it’s somehow illegitimate to see a trailer and (backed up by the last four entire movies by these idiots) claim that you think it looks like a piece of shit. And this movie looks like a piece of shit, and is a sequel to a movie that was a piece of shit, and there is no indication that anything has changed.
(“But what about Aquaman? And Wonder Woman?”)
Okay, Aquaman looks awfully cool and fuckit I’ll be honest by awfully cool I mean amazingly hot:
That said? This whole design is more of the what am colors? nonsense that both of these franchises are draped in, and frankly the inclusion of the characters just makes me think the movie is gonna be unwieldy and overstuffed in addition to depressing and stupid. Be honest: would you really know this was supposed to be Wonder Woman if no one told you in advance?:
Totally something I wanna spend ten bucks on.
(EDIT: Just saw this. How infinitely better is this? Way infinitely better.)
There’s a weird kind of freedom in today and tomorrow’s posts, because judging from the traffic yesterday and what I’ve gotten so far today, I can say with a fairly high degree of certainty that absolutely no one is going to read anything I write for the next two days. So: nerd post. Huge nerd post. Unforgivable nerd post.
Let’s talk about what would happen if Hulk fought Superman.
Yes, that’s really what I’m writing about. Feel free to tune out right now. Or not, because you need to watch these first. I just discovered these videos yesterday, since the most recent bit has just been released, but an animator by the name of Mike Habjan has apparently spent a good chunk of the last three years of his life putting these little CGI videos together. Part one, I’ll admit, is not going to blow you away. The next three, though? They become progressively more and more awesome each time.
So, watch some videos and then I’m going to geek out:
Literally my only gripe is that Superman isn’t bleeding after the ass-kicking he gets in Part 3. It’s obvious that he’s in a hell of a lot of pain but there ought to be some visible wounds– although maybe that’s too much modification to the model or something; I don’t know– it still looks fantastic. What’s awesome about these fights is that they go exactly how you’d think they might– Superman uses his heat vision and speed a lot, and Hulk just sort of sits back and waits for Superman to screw up enough for Hulk to grab him, which results in the tremendous ass-kicking that Superman catches at the beginning of Part 3. Superman, it should be noted, isn’t going to be terribly used to getting hurt— he’s got one, maybe two other villains who can challenge him on the level that Hulk does. Hulk, on the other hand, you can hurt– it just doesn’t matter, because it’s going to heal anyway and because being hurt just makes him angrier, and that’s always a bad idea.
There’s two ways for Superman to win this fight, at this point, since “End it as quickly as humanly possible” is no longer an option: 1) Get Hulk out into orbit, where the sun’s rays are rejuvenating Superman constantly and Hulk doesn’t have any leverage to counteract Superman’s speed and eventually strand him on the moon or toss him into the Sun or something; and 2) play possum, and just hope he can survive the beating until Hulk loses interest. Note that if you survive a fight with the Hulk? You won.
The longer it goes on punch-for-punch, the angrier Hulk gets, and the more impossible it becomes for Superman to win the fight. You cannot outlast the Hulk. Superman’s reserves aren’t literally unlimited the way Hulk’s are.
Actually, one more gripe, but I’ve had this gripe with every incarnation of the Hulk ever because it may actually just be my idea– I’ve always thought that if we’re going to stick with this angry = strong idea for the Hulk, he should get bigger as he gets angrier. His size has always been inconsistent; let’s actually use that.
WARNING: Higher geek content than normal.Prepare yourself as you see fit.
As I said the other day, one of my oldest friends is in town. She’s been with us for Thanksgiving so many times that it’s basically assumed she’s going to be here by now. She is not remotely the geek that I am, but we still spend a fair amount of time when we’re together playing video games. The PS3 (which arrived this morning, and I had time to take out of the Amazon box but not actually hook up) was entirely her faulthalf her faultat least a quarter her faultslightly her fault, and she bought Lego Marvel Heroes (or whatever it’s called) for me, both of us believing that since it was co-op it ought to be a fun thing for the two of us to do for a while.
Sigh.
LEGO Marvel Super Heroes (that’s it) has a fun game hiding in there somewhere, I swear it does. It combines LEGO and superheroes, for shit’s sake; I like both of those things, and the combination all by itself ought to be enjoyably goofy enough that it carries the game. It does not. There’s too much bullshit in there getting in the way of your fun:
The camera. Sucks. Suuuuuuucks. There are two different kinds of split-screen: static horizontal split, where each of you get half of the screen and you can’t see anything because your field of view is shit, and dynamic, where the border between your screen and your partner’s screen shifts and slides around and sometimes you’re on the same screen together and holy Jesus is it completely impossible to ever figure out where you are or what’s going on. Even in the static mode you seem to inexplicably shift sides of the screen every now and again, and combining that with the fact that you can shift characters just makes keeping track of your character on screen a pain.
In addition, you’re frequently just out of view. The camera’s almost completely not user-controllable, and there’s all sorts of stuff hidden behind game geometry or walls or just random junk that you can’t manipulate the camera to let you see behind. Combine that with the game’s penchant to stick you in hallways or small areas and the inherent problematic nature of 3rd person 3D gaming, and the result is garbage.
Related to the last point, most of the time there’s very little indication of what you’re actually supposed to be doing. For example, there’s a battle with the Abomination early on where you’re supposed to shine lights on him to stun him so that the Hulk can beat him up (because, uh, that’s how he works, I guess…). Now, I’ve been a gamer since I was tiny; I speak Video Game with a fluency that my friend doesn’t, so between being trained by the game’s do-this-then-lather-rinse-repeat strategy of previous bosses and being familiar with the “weaken, then attack” trope because it’s so common in other games, I figured this out immediately from the game’s one comment that light bothered him.
Sub-gripe: this is your second fight with the Abomination; the first one was outside in full daylight. And light isn’t a weakness for the Abomination. This is dumb.
Anyway, I was busy as the Hulk fighting off hordes of minions and occasionally fending off the bad guy, so it was left up to her to handle the light issues until the frustration just got to be too much and I took over. I managed to get the second light shone on him and she beat him up, then ran over to where the third one was and… nothing. No spotlight. I managed to flash a light green and then had nothing to hit or break or anything. I figured I’d forgotten to do something elsewhere on the stage, so I ran around looking for it. For fifteen minutes. While she beat up minions and the Abomination’s smell-attack, which shoves you away and keeps you from doing anything, got more and more annoying.
This is the point where my wife looked over and said “Are you guys actually having any fun? Because you’ve both sounded really unhappy for about half an hour.”
At this point I discovered what I’d missed: a couple of bricks, invisible and hidden behind a wall, that I’d not managed to smash and which turned into something I needed to get the spotlight up. At this point we quickly dispatched the beast and ended the level. But it took twenty minutes to find an invisible brick. This is not good game design, not at all. And the game is stuffed full of things like this, plus lots of LEGO shorthand where you’re supposed to play a level through multiple times with multiple different characters so there will be bits blocked off… but if you don’t know that, you’re just frustrated, because there’s a big shiny thing right there and you can’t get it to do anything.
Fucking fetch quests. Game developers who use fetch quests should be punched in the dick. And if I’m playing as the fucking Hulk and someone asks me to help him wash a window, which actually fucking happened, I should get to respond by picking that person up and throwing him through said window. You have got to be fucking kidding me, game.
So, yeah. Shoulda been fun. Isn’t. And it’s not like I haven’t played the LEGO games before; it may just be the co-op that’s magnifying the game’s/genre’s issues, but right now I’m upset that my friend paid $50 so we could play this thing. Blargh.
(You may have thought that was nerdrage. It was not. What follows is nerdrage.)
Now let’s talk about Man of Steel, which I watched most of last night. I was initially really excited about this movie, but I didn’t manage to go see it during opening weekend and the reaction to it convinced me that it was a terrible idea. And yes, yes it would have been a terrible idea, because this film gets every single thing about Superman wrong except for his powers. I’m not seeing any more superhero movies attached to Christopher Nolan; his Batman films were terrible (well, the first one was; I refused to see the next two) and this movie sucks too; that’s enough strikes. I’ve said several times that I might have liked Batman Begins had it been called Ninja Bat-Costume Dude, and Man of Steel would have been a decent movie had it been called Strong Laser-eyed Alien with a Coward for a Father who Lets him Die because, well, why not? Crying builds character.
Fuuuuuuuuck that movie. I would have walked out of the theater at the point where Jonathan Kent– Jonathan fucking Kent, the man responsible for Superman’s fucking moral core, which is the single most important thing about the character– blithely suggests that letting a busload of children die would have been just fine because letting people know about Kal-El’s secret (and I’m calling him Kal-El; there’s no “Clark Kent” in this movie, and the fact that they invent Clark Kent at the end is ridiculous) would have been inconvenient. And if I hadn’t left the theater then, I certainly would have been gone (and, in fact, did leave the room and go read for an hour) when Kal-El lets his father die in the stupidest way imaginable because he goes and runs off to save a dog.
Fuck this movie. Fuck it, fuck it, fuck it, and I haven’t even gotten to the part where Superman lets millions of people in Metropolis die at the end without any real remorse at all until the point where three more are suddenly important, and he breaks some moral code against killing that he doesn’t have any reason to have because no one in his life up until now has been a good person. Fuck it, fuck it, fuck it.
At some point last night at OtherJob I wrote an entire blog post in my head. I was pretty convinced it was a good one, too. Now it’s 10 AM Sunday morning and the only thing I’ve managed to achieve is a cup of coffee and a shower and I have no idea what in the world I might have gotten into my head to write about.
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