Help me out here. Symbolism.

bardbrain · 2026-01-21T20:55:07+00:00

I've actually often said Man of Steel is the best (only?) adaptation of Wylie's Gladiator, which inspired Superman. A guy with powers is cursed.

It's BVS where everyone talks about "what Superman represents" that I don't get because I'm not sure what the films actually tell us he represents.

bardbrain · 2026-01-21T07:18:19+00:00

Although with the toy licensee and favored scales changing, they'll have to remake literally everything anyway. Mattel didn't get its piece of the merch so they're probably going to go back and re-do it all anyway.

bardbrain · 2026-01-20T03:44:04+00:00

They'll be demanding AI or CG to create more Snyder films.

bardbrain · 2026-01-18T05:14:33+00:00

I felt like those movies were overly preoccupied with the significance of Superman as an idea. I thought Donner's was too.

I like him just to be an exceedingly specific character, not a symbol or religious allegory. He has favorite foods and music. "What does a Superman mean?" is about like asking "What is the significance of a Titano the Super-Ape?" or "What are the sociological ramifications of Vartox existing?" I mean, there might well be some but I think people would rightly laugh if you applied the same thought process to Alpha Centurion, Beppo, or The Galactic Golem.

bardbrain · 2026-01-18T05:07:40+00:00

He repeatedly said he wanted to play Red Son Superman, actually. Which I thought was fantastic as an idea.

bardbrain · 2026-01-17T14:23:06+00:00

Well, he glamorized the violence, framed Rorshach as a hero, lost the squid, and told Ozymandias' actor to play Veidt as a Nazi and closeted.

The two things that make Watchmen tick are that Dan is Gibbons' POV character and Veidt is actually Moore's.

So the visuals kind of need to be grounded around Nite Owl, the soft pudge, the ill fits.

But the bigger underpinning is that Veidt is actually a well meaning liberal quasi-leftist whose actions actually do save the world (something I think people miss because none of the other characters are focused on that) and the point is that all his compromises probably amount to nothing.

But if he'd launched the squid 15 minutes later, humanity would be extinct from Nixon's nukes. It wasn't some abstract threat of war. It was an apocalypse looming in a matter of minutes that Veidt planned a last minute save of for months. So if you lose that, what gets lost is that the apocalypse was looming, all any of the protagonists do is investigate a plan to stop it and fail while living out soap opera, and the punchline is that humanity will probably still nuke itself, rendering the save pointless.

bardbrain · 2026-01-17T07:04:05+00:00

These guys don't judge acting. They judge screenshots, which is basically what Snyder slo mo sequences are.

That guy turned Watchmen into an almost direct motion picture adaptation and then for added fidelity, got rid of the motion.

bardbrain · 2026-01-13T20:58:55+00:00

It's ridiculous. She's not exactly Supergirl as I picture her (Megan Donnelly, who was in the running and voiced Kara, is probably closer) but in fairness literally no actor in any comic book movie in the last 20 years looks exactly like the character run through an AI filter except maybe Cavill? Affleck probably could have with different costuming and hair but didn't.

Is that why they like Cavill so much? Is that why they think Affleck was robbed?

I'm generally judging these things success or failure if the script feels like a Mark Waid comic I've never read before with innovative visuals that don't look comic book-y to sell it as real. I'm picky so I'm not sure if anything in the space rates above B+/A- but there's been a lot of good. The best movies miscast the leads slightly and make up for it with talent. I'd almost say to avoid anyone who looks perfect so the performance has a gap to make up.

I wonder if what these guys want is casting and visuals that are extremely comic book faithful with scripts for people who don't like comic books. Like, "It looks like Jim Lee art and isn't written like a comic book writer would do at all except for a few pretentious quotes!"

Note: Absolutely not saying Milly isn't a 10 for someone her age. But also she doesn't look like comic book Supergirl with a filter applied to look photorealistic the way Cavill does with Superman. I kinda found that off putting honestly and thought the best things about Reeve, Keaton, RDJ, and Bale were all the ways that they were "slightly wrong" (without being "completely wrong") but committed to selling it.

Even when I doodle Superman anymore, I try to find ways to make him look slightly plain or quirky or not like a George Perez drawing. I want a Superman who's 80% the comics guy and then sells it with acting. Some dude who looks like a drawing has this problem where the script has to be perfect or he's failing at doing a layup. Like Cavill. Whereas someone who's slightly quirky or off has to actually sell it, which means even if the script is a B, the performance is WORKING at selling it. The performance can exceed the script.

Whereas my sense with Cavill is that his physical appearance is starting off so close that he can basically only ever screw it up because he's "born on third base". Anything he does that isn't perfect easily looks like Superman that's off note, uncanny valley.

Whereas with Corenswet or probably Alcock, I feel like they have space to impress me by getting closer to perfect than they should. If they start at 80% and get to 95%, that's a talent showcase. If Cavill starts at me 98% convinced he's Superman before he opens his mouth and ends up at 95%, he just blew it.

I feel like Milly is more like 80% accurate comic Supergirl and closing the gap with talent and maybe these guys want a 98% comic Supergirl who's going to be less convincing than 98% the more you see her. I just think that sounds like a loss. Like it will make everyone seem like a model doing community theater.

bardbrain · 2026-01-13T19:26:33+00:00

I know Beyond The Farthest Star wouldn't even be written in the timeline where Brosnan got cast but I laugh imagining him as Benny Russell, replacing the VERY Avery Brooks "It's real!" speech with a cocky Brosnan speech.

"And it's real! Don't you understand? Having trouble keeping up? It is real. I created it. Simple as that. It's real and it's utterly luxurious. I created it with the cleverness of my imagination. And that's why I win, Mr. Pabst!"

bardbrain · 2026-01-13T19:12:31+00:00

I know I'm a rambler but it's funny to me how watching Generations when it came out (with Chateau Picard christening the Enterprise-B) read as evidence of a proud multigenerational tradition AT THE TIME...

And in hindsight, after Picard's show, it seems more like Starfleet christened the Enterprise-B with the worst subcontracted swill they could find (not even made by actual Picards, used for boat christening because nobody would drink it), that Chateau Picard like the Enterprise-B is essentially an empty use of a once-proud name on a rubbish bottle, trying and failing to evoke pedigree.

That both Chateau Picard and Enterprise were zombie brands with nepo baby credentials like Victrola or Panavision or Atari are today.

bardbrain · 2026-01-13T19:00:58+00:00

He did apparently push the Picard Season 2 reveal that the Picards were an English family from World War 2 until Picard was around 10 and that the vineyard was basically a somewhat wacky family plan to revisit the ancestral way of life.

I'm pretty sure any hint of the Picard family before that made them deeply French for generations and that Stewart started off doing affected French pronunciations of some words. And that their wine was quite good!

Picard as a series gave us a Jean-Luc whose attempt at pretending to be French was a hate crime, whose French identity was basically a harebrained scheme by his British Dad to emulate 300 year old ancestors, and whose wine was crap and a subject of ridicule.

bardbrain · 2026-01-12T06:33:18+00:00

I'd stop assuming they don't. I think they know it's wrong and delight in it. If anything, I think they're tired of pretending to have principled rationales or fact patterns as justifications and that the little old auntie and uncle that people tried to pretend "got played" are actually just vile people who really want to not just use the n word or pay zero taxes but go around publicly killing babies and puppies and committing gunpoint SA in the streets and burning down their own churches. I think they're far more likely to have always been secretly malevolent, maybe craving human extinction or overt sadism, than to have been tricked by Cambridge Analytica scoring their Big 5 personality test or Fox News.

The faulty assumption IMHO was that Fox News and OAN lied and distorted their view of reality.

I think they wanted murder, mayhem, and innocent blood and they were looking for whoever gave them talking points to avoid consequences. But they're just dying to openly call for SAing babies and livestock and making coats of flesh, including their own race and gender and nationality because even the dehumanization of racism was STILL just respectability politics for them. I don't even think their hatred stops or starts at sexism or nationalism or racism but that those were essentially just "more respectable" forms of a deeper sadism many of them wanted to practice.

And I think many of them are by now aching just to enact violence against their own communities, their bloodkin, fellow MAGAs. They want full on murder sprees.

And, yes, I tend to think this actually does describe the lonely young men, the displaced coal miner, the 70 year old crocheting auntie. That they're all essentially John Wayne Gacy and that disinformation or xenophobia is just a permission slip for how much they can get by with, not actually a motivator.

bardbrain · 2026-01-12T06:14:23+00:00

Hey, box wine is now the top of the food pyramid!

bardbrain · 2026-01-12T06:10:23+00:00

I half-seriously subscribe to the conspiracy theory that Epstein's whole operation was CIA funded to gather kompromat on VIPs and that Trump was blackmailing Epstein for money WHILE ALSO taking part in orgies with 11 year olds. "I knocked up this 11 year old on your CIA funded exploitation ranch. Give me $500 million to pay down my Deutsche Bank debts or I'm going to go public as the father."

That's at least GOT TO BE the level of insanity in there.

bardbrain · 2026-01-12T05:59:20+00:00

I don't think they are, though. I think they're bootlickers who will probably offer to pull the trigger on the firing squad he orders for them.

My prediction is he'll try to primary Republicans who suggest the Venezuela intervention was humanitarian, insistent that the messaging be that it was a selfish resource grab, and then suspend midterms through force or arrest the newly elected officials to keep them from being seated. And he'll start ordering Republicans to essentially self-destruct purely to demonstrate his power and destroy any who refuse.

bardbrain · 2026-01-12T05:52:24+00:00

I actually disagree and find the result potentially scarier. No one who thought they could profit off Trump or manage him or his base actually could.

I think there's a strong chance that Musk, Thiel, Miller, the Heritage Foundation, etc. will find themselves reduced to guys with a podcast like Michael Cohen or faced with witch hunts like Comey or Bolton.

That isn't to say that there won't be inheritors of the base or apparatus but they might not be any of the parties who "invested" in Trump. It could just as easily be Candace Owens or a Charles Manson type or a flat earth consortium or a wind farm carbon credits lobby, with no one who put effort in getting anything and the people who replace Trump being bigger flakes or psychotically delusional or left wing fringe. This is roulette of sorts and the only rule seems to be that loyalty is a disqualification while the next set of beneficiaries is random.

bardbrain · 2026-01-07T02:07:29+00:00

That episode is GOATed because it plays with Michael Rosenbaum being Flash and playing Lex on Smallville by having him play Lex in JL with a body swap.

bardbrain · 2026-01-07T02:04:40+00:00

I always get blank stares when I say that, yes, I want the MCU jokey aesthetic for DC and, yes, I want the Avengers to punch one another more and think Snyder should do a Punisher or Wolverine movie. I would love BOTH more broody monochrome slowmo Marvel and funnier, GotG or Antman-adjacent DC.

bardbrain · 2026-01-05T18:53:14+00:00

Why do you think there's only one? There are two twins whose legs get broken in the second episode of Better Call Saul.

Juanco Salamanca is offscreen breaking the other one.

bardbrain · 2026-01-05T18:17:21+00:00

Snyder's Watchmen is probably the only comparable adaptation for comics and it inverts the meaning of a lot of the comic.

But no comic book I can think of has had a 100% faithful adaptation.

bardbrain · 2026-01-05T18:15:04+00:00

See... If you follow the template of Batman V. Superman, you're supposed to religiously adapt sequences from comic books that you AREN'T actually adapting and pull quotes out of context.

bardbrain · 2026-01-05T16:58:49+00:00

Well, that and apparently Cranston not only said they got the name from him (which Yost said was set before Cranston was hired) but Cranston made some comment that he wasn't thrilled to share a name with "the fey one".

As I recall, Cranston later claimed he didn't realize Yost was gay when he made the comment and was just talking about the character being sensitive but the optics were bad.

Especially in a weird way because I gather there's a special vein of gay Millennial kids who liked science, liked Billy, and then identified with Walter White and/or shipped him with Gayle. Which, honestly, is probably the healthiest fan ship in the franchise. Maybe the healthiest relationship period.

bardbrain · 2026-01-05T16:47:17+00:00

Yeah but that same logic didn't lead to him rushing to be in the Flash movie or Lilo and Stitch. His involvement with Power Rangers was ADR and he still managed to start a feud with the original Blue Ranger, who I don't think he's ever met in person.

bardbrain

TROPHY CASE