humanist + humorist

I’ve had an unusually productive streak with comics lately, which means I’ve watched a bunch of stuff. Have a grab-bag of reactions.

Disney’s Wish

It’s just as half-baked and disappointing as all the reviews say.

My personal least-favorite manifestation of this was, the villain starts off acting like a classic Overprotective Disney Parent (think King Triton, or the grandmother from Encanto), then makes a way-too-fast pivot to classic Unrepentant Disney Villain (think Jafar, or Maleficent). It’s not a big reveal that he was putting on a front — he seems sincere! He’s doing some things wrong, but for sympathetic reasons! Until the minute he learns how to do something evil, and then for the rest of the movie he’s…just evil. The people who cared about him at the start of the movie don’t even get an emotional moment of trying to talk him down at the end. It’s like the first half came from a totally different draft of his character arc than the second half.

Also, it tries to have a message of “put in the effort to make your wishes happen for yourself, instead of relying on magic to do it for you.” But we also get examples like “I wish I could fly” — and not from Dumbo, either. Humans can’t just make themselves flight-capable via hard work and moxie!

I really liked this video about all the beautiful things the animation didn’t do with color and light. Using Tangled as its primary counter-example of “look, Disney, we know you can do this, so why didn’t you?”

Shazam + Shazam 2 + Black Adam

The first one is just as good as the reviews say. One of maybe 3 widely-acclaimed movies in the whole attempt at a DC cinematic universe, and rightly so. It’s fun! It’s sweet!

There’s a point it makes, without hitting you over the head with it — we open with a wizard looking for a pure-hearted child to grant his powers to, and rejecting every candidate as Not Perfect Enough. Then he gets stuck in a situation of “I can only reach one more kid, whoever comes in here next I’ll just have to take” — and he gets the definitely-not-perfect Billy Batson, who, sure enough, starts out using the powers in selfish and self-serving ways. But then — he rises to the occasion! Almost like kids don’t need to be perfect from day one. Like, gosh, maybe any kid could be a hero, if they had a chance to learn and grow into it.

The other two movies (one is a direct sequel with the same characters, the other is about an unrelated guy from the same power lineage) got much more “meh” reviews. I went in with low expectations, prepared to cut them a lot of slack.

And…they didn’t need it? They were also good!

Shazam 2 doesn’t outdo the first one, but it’s also not just a sequel for the sake of making a sequel — they found another story in this universe worth telling. Black Adam is set in a fictional Middle Eastern country, where a bunch of second-tier Justice League types show up to give him trouble, and it was very satisfying how many of the locals kept saying “why don’t you superhero types ever visit this part of the world just to help us?”

That was a much more anvilicious message, but eh, some anvils need to be dropped.

Powerless (TV)

This one I basically didn’t hear about at all. Which…is probably why it got canceled after only one season. A real bummer, because it’s fun and underrated.

It’s a workplace sitcom set in the DC universe, focusing on a plucky group of Wayne Enterprises employees. All about the day-to-day lives of the ordinary people whose commutes get disrupted by supervillain attacks, who have to call tech support when the sci-fi equipment at the office malfunctions, who share exciting gossip about the cool superheroes too famous for any of them to meet in person. (Although sometimes Batman uses gadgets that sound like new in-development products they haven’t released to the market yet. Weird coincidence, huh?)

Basically, it does for Research & Development what I was hoping She-Hulk: Attorney At Law would do for lawyers. (And, you know, She-Hulk did it, about half the time! This show does it all the time.)

Good Omens 2 (TV)

No, I hadn’t actually seen this, even though it came out a year ago. (Although I saw enough secondhand discourse that I was spoiled for, as it turns out, almost everything.) Yeah, this is the most awkward time to catch up. I know, I know.

(Roundup of coverage and statements about Gaiman since the assault allegations went public. It’s depressingly thin.)

I liked a lot of it. The comedy scenes were golden — Muriel’s first appearance in the human world was one of the funniest things I’ve seen in a while. And the whole Job flashback sequence was a classic A/C remix/commentary on the original story. If I had to guess which parts were directly based on ideas Pratchett discussed with Gaiman IRL before his death, that would be at the top of my list.

That said, a lot of parts just didn’t gel for me. Including the “major plot arcs that carried throughout the whole season” parts.

And for a canon I’ve been fannish about for 20+ years now, it’s weird how “meh” I feel about it. Hard to tell if that’s flat writing, or if I just came to the season pre-burned-out from all that secondhand discourse, or what. I’m glad it got made, for the sake of the scenes I really liked…but I’m not on the edge of my seat waiting for season 3.

How did this post get this long

There’s still half a dozen series I meant to talk about, but somehow this is 1K words already. (Tune in next time for, most likely, a deeply ridiculous amount of time having feelings about the Thundercats.)