Dan DiDio, DC Fans…We Need To Talk

For any of you that pay any attention to my twitter at all and notice the degree of ranting or lecturing I do, thank you for putting up with me, because frankly, I feel like if I didn’t do that, I’d only sparsely contribute to Twitter at all and I know how powerful a marketing tool it can be so I’m trying to simply stay active, gathering as many “friends” for myself and the site as I can.  Collaboration is the ticket, after all.  But over the past few days or even weeks on twitter, there’s been a movement.  An explosion, if you will, to get Mr. Dan DiDio fired from DC.  Now, with respect to both sides of the argument, DiDio, folks, have a seat.  We all need to have words.  DiDio…you first.

Now, in defense of DiDio, I know what he MEANT to say however long ago it was that he remarked that Superheroes shouldn’t have happy personal live.  But, Mr. DiDio, sir, as someone who is a fan of common-freaking-sense, I will say this…you chose your words PATHETICALLY.  What you MEANT was that Superheroes should not have cartoonishly PERFECT personal lives in which everything is hunky dory and nothing goes wrong.  The way you made it SOUND, however, was that all heroes ever must be miserable at almost all times behind closed doors.  That’s the message you conveyed.

Now, for the point that you were trying to make, or at least what my take on what I believe you meant, I don’t fully agree or disagree.  A good comic, say, Spider-Man focuses, not just on the drama of being a superhero, but the drama they encounter behind closed doors.  AND it focuses on how their being a superhero affects their personal lives.  For a character like Batman, the idea of sacrificing one’s personal life makes sense.  But not all heroes are freaking Batman, sir.  Batman WATCHED his parents being murdered two feet  away when he was a SMALL CHILD.  It’s safe to say that he is perhaps the most justifiably scarred hero in the Justice League.  He sacrifices his personal life to assure that what happened to him will never happen to anyone else.  But even he isn’t without having happier moments behind closed doors.  The Bat Family is just that…a family.  Alfred, Barbara, Dick Grayson, Tim Drake, and so-on are family to him.  They bring him happiness and keep him grounded.  They are his foundation, so to speak.  But why you seem so utterly hard-pressed to make ALL of their lives as grim as his is beyond me.

I don’t want to get into the particulars of this Bat-Woman marriage fiasco too much, but, in short, this was you deciding not to play ball.  Because you decided not to play ball, you lost the creative team that was doing its darnedest to make the book as great as it apparently was (I have not read it, I do not need to.  The issue is universal).  Setting aside, for a moment, the fact that you’re assuming marriage = peachy keen happiness, why does the entire Bat Family have to suffer and struggle in the way that Bruce does personally?  There are all manner of ways a person can struggle in their personal lives.  Going back to Spider-Man, the guy’s life is anything but easy, made more difficult by the fact that, somewhere down the line, the writers really started hating Peter Parker.  But initially he was struggling with paying the mortgage, worrying about GETTING a date, dealing with growing up and all other manner of complications that life can throw at you, especially when you decide to “split yourself in half”.  There are other ways that people can struggle.  Making everyone in the Bat Family isolated from even having a personal life defeats the purpose of the Bat Family for one, and actually makes them, as Batman’s support, less interesting because then they’re just re-skins of him.

Going back to the subject of marriage briefly.  This one, I know, is not just you, DiDio…but the way you went about this had ZERO class, at all.  For all the hate we give Marvel’s treatment of the subject, they at least had the decency to try and make a story out of the split between Peter and MJ (however god awful it was) instead of just deciding AT THE LAST SECOND to not let the marriage happen in editing, driving the creative team off.  But better yet, just let the two crazy kids get hitched.  There are plenty of ways you can incorporate drama into the relationship without it being grating.  And I will bet you MONEY; the creative team you drove off had plans for how to do it.

The point is that a hero doesn’t have to sacrifice their personal lives absolutely in order to be a hero.  By virtue of what you SAID, you make it sound like, under no circumstances, should a police officer, fire fighter, paramedic, or what have you, be allowed happiness…and now you may proceed to try and work your foot out of your mouth and that pole out of your backside…because that’s just the first hand stuff.

Let’s talk, for a moment, about your Twitter feed.  Your twitter IS NOT the official DC Twitter.  You are perfectly free to speak how you will.  Unless DC’s sales drop as a result of your expressing a lack of content with how things are going, I doubt, VERY HIGHLY, that it’ll cost you your job like so many fans (honestly, myself not withstanding) have been calling for.  Your Twitter, in particular your responses to the fans that express contempt towards your little pet project can be summed up in the following phrase.  “Hi, I’m Dan DiDio, and I’m DC’s go-to Tool!”  You do recognize that, yes?  Ya screwed up.  Ya drove away a NUMBER of creative teams and lost MANY customers…show some accountability.  We fans wouldn’t be half as critical of you if you weren’t so hard-pressed to defend every single action as if Jack Kirby himself told you to do it in a dream and therefore it must be okay.  Just say it for ONCE in your history with DC.  “I was wrong”.  PLEASE say it.  I know your ego’s as fragile as wet tissue paper but it’s really all I’m asking of you.

Now…fellow fans…I want to start by telling anyone that’s just a DC Apologist to leave because the bulk of you will probably explode at what I’m about to say.  Whether that be in glee or in rage is up to you.

To those of us who are/were supporting the “#FireDiDio” trend on Twitter…get this.  DC is owned by Warner Bros.  Warner Bros is THE rival to Disney…the Disney that owns Marvel and Star Wars.  As Jimmy stated in Episode 10 of Comic on the Dot, the sheer amount of “Absolute Power!” Disney has is ludicrous…and Warner Bros can rival it.  Warner Bros IS NOT going to do a THING just because of a hashtag.  And I’m sorry but a minor dip in DC’s profits isn’t going to do anything either.  Does that mean we lose?  No.  Does that mean we give up?  HECK no.  It means we just gotta find a way to play smarter.  The simple fact is that Dan DiDio is making DC money.  DC’s profits took such a huge bump when New 52 came around, that the dip it took well into New 52’s run is still more money than they were making before the reboot happened.  We, the fans, shouldn’t stop what we’ve been doing.  It’ll hold water.  But if we want to do anything, a hashtag and a minor price drop isn’t going to help.  We’ve gotta play ball too.  We should be finding ways of showing that there were other ways of making money WITHOUT alienating the fans they already had and I am not talking about apologist butt kissers who will follow every move they make.  I am talking about fans who, like me, will scold DC when they pull something this freakin’ stupid.  The amount of money DC stands to make from creating the equivalent of Marvel’s Ultimate Universe as I have proposed before would have been infinitely more than the money made from this reboot.  Why?  They’d be attracting new fans WITHOUT alienating old ones and driving them away from books.

“But the multiple universes are too hard to keep up with!”

People…the way DC traditionally HANDLES alternate universes is what makes it so difficult.  If it was really that difficult, then the Ultimate Universe, however sucky it may or may not be right now, would not still exist.  It’s as simple as that.  Clearly, people are buying them.  I have more than one acquaintance who like both the 616 and Ultimate Spider-Man comics and know the ins-and-outs of both and can RECITE them to you.  Showing them the figures is what’ll make a difference.  We don’t live in a world of sincerity, sadly.  We live in the world where major organizations, even ones geared toward entertainment, care about money more than a following.   DC simply has to get better at handling multiple universes, and the way to do THAT is to not be so determined to make them cross into one another.  But it does work and the only idea I can think of for DC not doing it is that they don’t want anyone to say that they’re blatantly copying Marvel…even though both companies have already BEEN blatantly copying one another for at LEAST two decades now.

DiDio, come back in here, this is for both parties.  I keep hearing Earth-2 is a great book.  I have no interest in it but many view this as the pinnacle of how an alternate universe book should be handled.  So the idea is simply this.  Bring back the old DCU and keep New 52 as a separate universe.  Iron out some kinks in both and there you go.  Money WILL be made from this.  You’ll be winning back old fans, keeping the ones you hooked with New 52, and everyone will be happy.  No one will have to call for your head as long as you don’t pull stupid crap like this again.  This is quite honestly the ultimate compromise.  Give Geoff Johns or someone else who respects his or her fellow creative teams the oversight over the “Old” DCU.  You can keep the New 52 Universe and iron it out…but I really REALLY suggest you work on your communication skills so things like losing creative teams and your twitter backlash don’t happen again.

Until I see some change in that direction or at least close to it, I’m not satisfied with the way things are being run at DC.  You may dismiss this as just the ramblings of another obviously biased fan, DiDio, but I am honestly concerned that you guys at DC don’t know what you’re doing wrong.  Fans, raging at the man isn’t going to do ANYTHING.  AT ALL.  If we want some change, we’ve got to be willing to play ball and compromise.  It’s as simple as that.  If there are ways you can think of that will get DC more money while supporting our cause, show ‘em, because otherwise, we’re not going to see that change.

Until that change comes, stand on whatever side of the debate you wish.  I’d prefer the debate didn’t need to exist…but it does.  If DiDio doesn’t start showing some accountability and start running things more tightly, I’ll continue to support the “#FireDiDio” movement.  But I am not unreasonable and I am nothing, if not practical.  So I acknowledge that all said movement does, for the time being, is allow me to vent.  Therefore, I am willing to seek out a middle ground, because there has to be one.  Don’t just rage.  Contribute something meaningful.  To quote Jimmy again, “Use your %$&@ing Noggins!”  It really isn’t as difficult as you might think.

Thanks for your time, guys,

-NNTV

Writeups: Looper, Seven Psychopaths, Hotel Transylvania, Wreck-It Ralph

I am no stranger to animated movies and no stranger to time travel movies but I had no idea what to expect from Seven Psychopaths. Easily the most lukewarm of the movies I’ve set myself up to review, Seven Psychopaths is a surprisingly intense and bloody tale of a man who becomes involved with gangsters and murder and gore and…the bottom line is that this is a very dark movie. That much I can say I expected. But it comes across almost like a Tarantino flick. The movie was extremely funny with a twisted sense of humor and every character was an overall thrill to watch. There is a tenseness to the movie that you cannot deny. I will say that, for me, the ending was…a bit much and it was REALLY gory. There weren’t many scenes where there was no blood on the screen. The ending was incredibly bittersweet for me and because of that, I do dock it a few points. On an overall, I’d give it a score even with the amount of psychopaths in the title. 7 out of 10.

Looper was hardly as lukewarm. I’ll say that, for personal reasons, I don’t really like this movie but I will not deny that it was well made, well executed, and did its job well. The Time Travel contrivances weren’t made a big deal of and the atmosphere was very cleverly designed. The acting was all top notch and the movie had a quirky sense of humor. This one is another one where the ending kind of ruined it for me. But I understand that not everyone shares my philosophy on endings so I won’t dock it points on that even though the ending does very heavily unhinge the movie even looking at it through someone else’s eyes but blame that on the time travel. I greatly enjoyed the flick until the ending so I’ll leave out my bias and give it an 8 out of 10. My reasoning for docking the extra point is because you’ll learn that people have this sort of psychic ability and it does play heavily into the plot but I feel like they didn’t go in depth with it as much as they should and that took away from me. But, then again, if you give someone a superpower, I’m just naturally going to want them to be front and center so that could just be my problem. What do I know?

Hotel Transylvania and Wreck-It Ralph are, by far, my two favorites of this bundle and for very different reasons. They share a score but I’ll get to that.

Hotel Transylvania first. I’ll grant that the storyline itself is pretty cliche but I don’t really care about cliches as long as they’re still executed well. The big fuss over cliches eludes me. I will also say that I actually really enjoyed the sense of humor given to this movie and I found that the animation, CG or not, was superb. The movie honestly does feel like a cartoon made by the man himself, Genndy Tartakovsky. The movie was a lot of fun and the sense of humor is much more adult than the former. The little references here and there are funny and there is one scene in this movie where anyone fed up with the Twilight Hype will most assuredly LOVE.

Wreck-It Ralph was a more original movie to me and came across as having a better movie execution. It had heart and the characters were fun. The story was well written and the voice acting was all surprisingly superb. The sense of humor wasn’t as adult and there are some notably ridiculous scene that I felt went a bit too far but it’s solid. The animation is wonderful and the resolution is terrific. This one definitely had a great climax in my eyes and you really get to see how Ralph, as a character, grows. Another fun thing is that the references to videogame culture are all really fun to try and find (the ones that aren’t obvious, anyway). The movie feels much more triumphant and to me it was just as enjoyable as Hotel Transylvania was, just for different reasons.

Both movies scrape out a triumphant 9 out of 10 from me. Let’s see what the rest of this year’s movies hold. Let’s hold our breath and hope Rise of the Guardians is, in fact, the animation powerhouse that it looks like it’ll end up being? That’s all, folks!

Write-Up: The Amazing Spider-Man

I’ve given my full review of this summer’s “The Amazing Spider-Man” and if you recall that review, then you know my personal rating.  I fully believe that for me it lived up to its name and is, by almost every stretch of the word, amazing.  It is not a cinematic masterpiece at all but, then again, that’s relative since there is no such thing (What, with clashing opinions and all).  So, without further ado, the full review of The Amazing Spider-Man review.

To start off, a lot of this review is going to simply expand on things I said within the Silver Screen Cinema episode.

Characters

If you read the comics (specifically the much older ones) and pay as close attention to them as I do, then you know whether or not these characters were written in well.  Were they?  For the most part, yes.

Peter Parker/Spider-Man did come across as the super smart, geeky, shy, and all around nobody that he is supposed to.  His character isn’t too heavy or anything for what is admittedly a much darker movie (at least in comparison to the original Raimi film).  After he becomes Spider-Man he has what the Raimi movies lacked.  While as a movie, itself, the original film had a lot of cute, quirky, and memorable moments, I felt that it lacked the real essence of Spider-Man and felt like Tobey acting.  He didn’t strike me as the infamous Web Head.  Here?  Spider-Man has that classic Spidey wit that everyone who loves the character loves about him.  Not only that, they actually use the Super Genius angle in this movie a lot more than the old one and the movie feels like it’s much more about the boy behind the mask than the mask itself.  The original movie had its moments but overall I felt like the mask dominated the movie.

Gwen Stacy is a character who, as I said, I was surprised by.  The reason is because I’ve read that they apparently took more inspirations for this movie from the Marvel Ultimate Universe.  I can’t tell you how much a loathe the Ultimate Universe.  One of the aspects of it I loathe is its ability to take any of my favorite characters and just WARP them.  Gwen Stacy was no exception.  HOWEVER, I was delighted to see that they used her Marvel 616 version more so than the Ultimate one.  She’s was geeky, she was clever, and she was sweet.  Would you like to know something else?  As much as I like Spider-Man 2, tolerate Spider-Man 1 and…ignore Spider-Man 3, I have to acknowledge that my least favorite part of all three movies is Mary Jane.  Why?  Because…she was utterly useless.  I like Mary Jane’s comic interpretations.  Why?  Because she’s TOUGH.  Mary Jane in the Raimi movies kept getting kidnapped and didn’t bother TRYING to fight back.  Gwen never particularly had as much of a spine in the comics as MJ though I admittedly like Gwen more because she’s a geek.  However, you’d better believe she doesn’t let that stop her.  She’s not charging head-first into battle throughout this movie but she TRIES.  She was a very lovable character just as much on screen as she was on the pages of the classic comics.

Captain Stacy is a character who I want to talk about as little as possible because he serves all of one purpose in this movie.  But that purpose is hugely important and also gives way to HEAVY spoilers.  So I’ll just skim over this one.  Captain Stacy is excellently played by Denis Leary as the tough, overprotective, but also caring father.  He’s also wise enough to straighten Pete up when he steps out of line and actually acts as something of a Father Figure for Peter at times.

Doctor Connors/The Lizard is where the characters are most lacking.  That isn’t too say he’s poorly done.  He isn’t.  But he doesn’t have an immense amount of depth.  I don’t think I’ll be spoiling anything by saying something ISN’T in the movie so I’ll say that the most pivotal aspect of the character, Dr. Connors’s family, is left out of the movie aside from a throwaway line.  That one little aspect would have given him so much more depth.  In the comics, his Obsession with this drug that transforms him is rivaled only by his love of his wife and son.  No wife and son here so the ultimate result of things turns out to be a rather sloppily thrown together execution in this departments.

Acting

The acting was fine if not great all around the board, honestly.  No one really missed a beat here.  Maybe a little cliche when it comes to The Lizard but that aside it was handled well.

Character Chemistry

The highlights of Character Chemistry in this movies go, not only to Peter/Gwen and Peter/Captain Stacy, but also to Peter/Uncle Ben.  If you go back and watch the original film, you’ll notice that the uncle been in that movie has all of about 10 minutes of screen time before he’s kill (Off screen, mind you).  Here?  He’s still around for about 40 minutes of the movie and you actually SEE it happen.  As Peter and his Uncle interact, you feel the relationship much more.  I’m not even sure Peter shared more than three lines with Uncle Ben in the original film.  Because you spend more time getting to know Uncle Ben and getting to understand how close Uncle Ben is to Peter, you actually FEEL for Peter when his uncle gets shot and you feel the gravity of the situation a lot more heavily.  It allows you to better understand the guilt complex that is such a HUGE part of the Spider-Man character.

Effects & Action

The action scenes of this movie, are almost all perfectly handled.  The effects don’t make the fights look like CGI versus CGI until maybe the last stretch of the movie.  Some people complained that the fight scenes weren’t as huge and epic as they should have been but that’s the problem.  Spider-Man isn’t a huge and epic character on his own.  At the end f the day, Spider-Man is just a street level superhero who occasionally has super villains after him and even then, his Super Villains aren’t villains like Dr. Doom.  They’re just massively dangerous criminals like Shocker or Rhino.  The contained nature of the fights fit with a Spider-Man movie.  Even in the flawless fight scene atop the elevated Train in Spider-Man 2, the fight itself was very contained.  They weren’t juggling one another around the entire city and destroying virtually everything in sight.  None of these fight scenes are really as impressive as that one but they’re pretty good to me at least.

Writing

I’ll admit that the movie isn’t perfect and the writing COULD have used work in a few areas.  To name a few general spaces where the writing was a bit “meh” The Lizard’s general write-up was just okay at best and there were a few things dropped from the movie.  I know they’ll tackle some of these things in the sequel but some things really should have just been in this one.

In the same vein is the Story.  The story was great excluding the Lizard bits which were just okay and I feel that this is because, again, they didn’t make him a complex enough villain.

Adaptation

Here is where we finally begin to enter possible Spoiler Territory.  You can skip this section if you don’t want to know ANYTHING.

Overall, this movie did WONDERS as an Adaptation in comparison to the original film.  The characters were almost PERFECTLY in tact with their comic counterparts.  My only real complaints in that department are Gwen and Lizard.  While I did enjoy them both overall, there was one aspect of both that I had slight problems with.  For one thing, Gwen actually knows that Peter is Spider-Man.  Now this might be something more in line with the Ultimate Universe but in the main 616 continuity, Gwen NEVER learned it.  It’s not just like a Mary Jane deal where she did learn it, she just didn’t learn it at the right time in the movie, Gwen isn’t supposed to learn his secret at all.  Gwen is supposed to pretty exclusively be Peter’s girlfriend, not Spider-Man’s (If that makes sense).  The Spectacular Spider-Man cartoon is a good example.  Gwen was Peter’s friend for a good while and even still, she never found out.  Too bad that show was cancelled, by the way.

As for Lizard, this one is less of an adaptation problem and more of a personal thing.  Lizard was, in essence, adapted perfectly well.  I just didn’t care as much for the VERSION of him that they chose to adapt.  I prefer the Lizard as a villain when he’s purely feral.  The combination of the Feral Lizard and him having his family in this movie would have made the Lizard a much more complex character.  Even if he couldn’t exactly think on a rational level.

Other

The movie was cut HEAVILY.  I mean by around 40+ minutes.  I feel like those cut bits contained some really good, interesting stuff.  But I know that the reason some of it was cut was because it revealed too much about Peter’s parents and they wanted to save some for the next movie.  No real problem with that.  My problem with it is that it makes the movie seem shorter.  I didn’t feel like I was watching a full movie.  It felt like only an hour or so had passed as if I was watching a TV movie or something of that nature.  I think that the movie could actually stand to be just a little bit longer but, hey, that’s just me.

Anyway, thanks for your time, people and I’ll be sure to bring you a new vid this Wednesday.  Unfortunately I’m sick so I may not be able to record right now.  No worries, though.  I have something special planned for you.  This may mean more to you, though, if you closely follow TGWTG.  So that’d be my own two cents on The Amazing Spider-Man.