Part 3: Batman v Superman v Prospects for A Successful Expanded Universe

Final installment: continued from part 1 - Zack Snyder vs. Superman, and part 2, Batman Vs. the Two Hour Trailer..

3. Grim and Dour Doesn't Work For Most Superheroes...

Everybody writing a script that breaks the fourth wall, because Deadpool made a lot of money, is going to discover soon that Deadpool didn't make a ton of money because he broke the fourth wall. It made a ton of money because it was exactly the kind of movie a Deadpool movie should be. It was as perfect a fit for that character as Christopher Nolan's films were for Batman. When other heroes who are not Deadpool try to be in a Deadpool movie, they will fail. If you tried to give Spider-man the same treatment Daredevil is getting on Netflix, it would be a train wreck and everyone would hate it.

Grim and dour works with a few superheroes. Batman. A nice, gritty Daredevil film could be really good, though unnecessary with the netflix series on. Ditto for The Punisher, if it's allowed to have an R rating. A gritty Wolverine could be awesome, depending on who plays him. The television Green Arrow is really working. Other superheroes will never fit into that tone. Thor is just too silly. Nobody wants to see a The Flash do an Oldboy-ish hammer fight scene. But for Daredevil, it's completely awesome. Warner had a ton of success, and made a ton of money, and got a ton of acclaim, for those bleak and gloomy and dour Dark Knight films. Because that's the kind of character Batman is. But Superman just isn't, and trying to play him that way was ill-advised at best, and a fatal mistake at worst. A grim Flash won't make it. I'm not sure if Wonder Woman will, but an Aquaman film that isn't even fun will be a really tough sell, because Aquaman's a tough sell to begin with. As Avengers 1 was the proof of concept for "phases," DC's film launching phase one cannot avoid comparisons with Avengers, and people came out of Avengers wanting to watch nine more films like that, thinking they'd probably be entertaining enough, because the actors were fun and watchable enough to fill in the scenes between the action set pieces. Nobody came out of BvS thinking it'd sure be awesome to endure eighteen to twenty more hours of loud, dour, and dumb.

You can make a movie for adults about Batman, because adults get the "he's only human" thing and appreciate the idea of human ability overcoming. Little boys like Superman, because nobody can tell him what to do, but he helps people anyway. To adults, Superman is kind of goofy, and adults are smart enough to recognize that Superman is too powerful, and sucks the drama out of a battle. A Superman aimed at adults is never quite going to work.

...And It's a Terrible Choice in the Long Term

But by making a Superman that doesn't appeal to kids, that I'd hesitate to bring my son to see, Warner Brothers is making a really, really stupid blunder. First, because that's not how Superman works, and they're turning their back on Superman's core demographic, and second, because kids today are the nerds of the future, and frankly, kids are way more loyal than nerds. Nerds are loyal to their characters, but they also have a very clear and specific idea of how their heroes should be portrayed on screen, and if you venture too far from that, they'll abandon you in the time it takes to record a butthurt youtube review. It is really really hard to build up goodwill among nerds (in such a way that general audiences will see your film too), and it is really easy to squander that goodwill. Compare that to kids, who, if you impress them, will beg their parents to bring them out to see the sequel in IMAX 3D, and want the entire set of toys and related merchandise for Christmas, and the halloween costume, and the underpants, and the coloring book, and the birthday cake, and then all that stuff again but slightly different when the sequel comes out.

Yeah, saying "Marvel is fun, DC is dark" is clearly a method of differentiating the two hero brands, and differentiation is good, I guess. But right now, the nerds of the future, with all their future disposable nerd income and future fierce nerd loyalty to their favorite nerd characters... are running around in Iron Masks and Hulk fists and Spider-man t-shirts and swinging Mjolnir hammers and Captain America shields, just like today's adult nerds ran around with toy lightsabers and Darth Vader masks and Superman capes. DC is not just leaving all that money on the table but surrendering it and future dollars to Marvel, by saying they're going to make superhero films for grown-ups. The farther you follow down the timeline, the worse an idea this is.

4. Setting Up an Entire Expanded Universe In One Film Is Simply Asking the Film to Do Too Much

This film introduced a new Batman, introduced him to Superman, required them to fight AND THEN become allies, introduced a new Lex Luthor, developed three antagonists for Superman - Batman, Lex, and Doomsday, as well as a new ally, Wonder Woman, while consolidating the universe's tone and introducing three new superheroes for future films, and giving Batman a reason to muster the Justice League while killing Superman. No wonder the film was bloated as anything: they gave it way, way, way too much to do. They crammed three or four films' worth of world-building and explaining and plotting into a single film.

Is Marvel's "Phase One" the only way to set up a cinematic universe? It's hard to say. But Marvel used four films -- Iron Mans 1 and 2, Thor and Captain America, to set up The Avengers. Four films of world building and character introductions, so that when Avengers came along, we could enjoy the ride instead of having to sit through reams of exposition. Particularly for characters like Thor, whose origins are kind of goofy, it helped not to have to explain that in the middle of setting up another car chase. Batman and Superman didn't need too much background explanation -- Superman already had his origin story and everybody knows Batman -- but does the casual fan care enough about Aquaman anyway? Or Cyborg? Letting Wonder Woman click through their clips was a clumsy and dumb way to tease future movies. That's the kind of stuff Marvel would have put in a post-credits stinger or a DVD easter egg.

Avengers knew they had something good when Iron Man did well, and Robert Downey Jr.'s Tony Stark left everybody wanting more. Only when Iron Man was a smash did they know they could swing for the fences with Avengers. Who is the insanely watchable sparkplug that will keep Justice League team scenes popping? There'd better be one, because a lot of people only go to films that give them characters they actually want to hang out with. From what I've seen so far, Superman's not that guy.

If I were in charge of the DC universe, there would have been a Batman solo film before BvS to establish Batman. Maybe also either a Wonder Woman or Flash film. There would have been a Batman vs. Superman film where they slugged it out, and gained each others' trust. THEN there would have been a Dawn of Justice film where they meet Wonder Woman, and Lex Luthor starts trying to lead a public backlash against superheroes. Maybe Flash or Green Lantern is the surprise reveal when Doomsday attacks instead of Wonder Woman. IF or AFTER fans have bought into the idea of a justice league film series, maybe Green Lantern (who has SO much backstory about the Green Lantern Corps to cover he's a difficult hero to put on film) gets a film, and if we can find someone who is as fun to watch as Robert Downey Jr. to play The Flash and/or Green Lantern, and send sparks around the room to drive Batfleck nuts the way Iron Man antagonizes Captain America... then we've got the basis for a nice, fun string of films I'd pay money to see. If the Batman solo film is completely huge, then Flash's film goes before BvS instead of after, or between BvS and Dawn of Justice.


Now, I’ll just check off the complaints I’ve read in other places, but I definitely agree with.

• First half was fragmented and nonsensical
• Dream sequences didn’t serve the story in any way (I hear it hints at sequels... I don't care. Sequel-hints are only allowed if they also advance this story.)
• Lex Luthor’s motivation was never made clear
• Lex Luthor’s entire exploding wheelchair subplot was extraneous: seeing Metropolis in ruins was already plenty motivation for Bruce Wayne to go after Supes. Lex could have vanished from the first half of the movie, and the movie would have been shorter, but not poorer. He could have vanished from the second half and only Doomsday's appearance wouldn't have happened. Which would have been OK, because it's Batman v Superman, not Batman v Superman v Doomsday.
• Lex Luthor is dumb. Using special bullets that can only be traced to Luthercorp in a move to set up Superman, and then using a special fancy wheelchair that could surely also be traced to him, in his bomb plan, seems to me like a detective skills test for Batman. Which Batman failed.
• Batman, The World’s Greatest Detective, wouldn't have failed that test. He'd have figured out what Luthor was up to faster than Adam West’s batman figuring out one of The Riddler’s riddles by playing word association with Burt Ward. This is the one big hole in the portrayal of Batman in this film: he's a meathead.
• The writing on the returned insurance checks resembled the writing on Robin’s costume, which seemed like a connection in the trailer, but wasn’t. I hate misleading trailers. Really hate them.
• Why did Lois Lane throw the spear in a pool?
• How did Lois Lane know she had to retrieve the spear...which she had just thrown into the pool?
• Why would J Jonah Jameson (just kidding I know it was Perry White) refuse Lois Lane a helicopter for a story, but give it to her when she said it was NOT for a story?
• Why could Batman find Martha Kent, but Superman couldn’t? Especially when he could locate Lois in half the time it takes to fall off a building.
• When did Lex Luthor figure out Superman was Clark Kent, in order to kidnap his mom?
• Why does Superman waste 20 seconds smooching Lois Lane while Batman and Wonder Woman are in mortal peril from Doomsday?
• Many of the scenes in the first half of the film could have been re-edited in any order without changing the movie significantly.
• Could teasing the upcoming justice league movies have been more clumsy and heavy-handed (click click click)?
• Why didn’t Superman give the Kryptonite spear to Wonder Woman, who doesn’t get killed by Kryptonite?
• Why didn’t Batman make something deadlier and easier to handle than a spear out of the kryptonite? Like a brass knuckles knife? Or some bullets?
• Why did Lex Luthor think making an unstoppable death monster would be a good idea in any way whatsoever? A smart Lex Luthor would have gotten control of that ship and then hidden it, and learned every secret of Kryptonian tech he could from it.
• If Batman had killed Superman, could Wonder Woman and Batman have beaten Doomsday on their own, and if not, how fucked would the entire planet have been? Lex is way too reckless here to pass as the smartest human alive.
• Nobody in America says that power can be innocent, or has for long enough that it is the oldest lie in America. Nobody ever says that. Except Lex Luthor, in order to say it is a lie. Zack Snyder or his writer is just writing whatever shit comes into his head.
• A plot as clumsy, and easy to connect back to Luthor, as kidnapping Martha Kent? The Lex Luthors I love are way more subtle than obvious tricks like this and the exploding wheelchair.
• Lex Luthor is more frightening if he is more clearly in control of his faculties, more calculating, in my opinion. He'd scare me more if he were together enough to actually deliver a 40 second speech at a gala in his honor.
• How is it that Superman seems to be finding out just now about the existence of Batman, who appears to have been doing his thing for a long time?
• Batman is killing people. Nobody could have survived a few of those explosions.
• What about Superman and his behavior (vanishing, sulking, brooding, wrecking entire city blocks) would make people want to build a giant statue of him after the people looking for him destroyed a whole downtown, instead of, say, a memorial to the thousands of people killed in the battle of Metropolis? That Superman allowed a statue of himself like that to go up and overshadow the dead, explains to me why many people don't like him.
• Seriously, Superman didn’t even clean up the Kryptonian ships he smashed? No wonder there’s a public backlash against him.
• This article is on the mark as to how badly the film treated its women.
• The ways they referenced The Dark Knight Returns did not have enough respect for that piece of comic history. Bruce Wayne tosses off the line "We've always been criminals" as a throwaway rather than as the pivotal moment of the end of the age of costumed heroes. There is no context for the lines he says to Superman about "the world only makes sense if you force it to"... many of the tricks he used to fight Superman were from that series as well, but Zack Snyder just didn't demonstrate that he understood what made that story so good, when he copped its ideas.

We are having some serious fridge logic issues here. You know, as well as those fundamental ones. I’m even going to go as far as to say George-Lucas-misreading-Star-Wars-fans-level problems, where he misunderstands what these heroes are about so badly that fans are going to turn on him.

I've predicted before, and I haven't seen anything to change my mind yet, that I still think when the world gets sick of comic book movies, DC is going to catch the backlash, the same way DiCaprio caught the Titanic backlash, but Kate Winslet didn't. When fans abandon superhero films en masse, it still looks like DC will take the biggest hit. And that'll be a shame, because Batman looks great on film, and Wonder Woman deserves better, and little kids around the world deserve there to be awesome Superman films being made every few years.

OK. It's all out of my system now. Carry on as you were, fellow fans!

Eulogy for The Marmot's Hole: The Official End Of The K-Blogosphere

After four years or so with the same layout, I've been making small tweaks to the blog and the sidebars: the names appearing there will be changing. If you know a blog or podcast that deserves a place on my sidebar, please let me know: I'd hate to be like one of those blogs I used to snicker at, with three-years out-of-date blog links in the sidebar (says the guy who just yesterday removed the link to ROKetship, who repatriated in 2011 or so).

Last December, something important happened in the "Korea-blogosphere" or "K-blogosphere." K-blogosphere is a term first used by GI Korea in a comment at Metropolitician Michael (now Dr.) Hurt's blog (here - sez google). I used it a lot myself around 2008 and 2009, when I blogged the most. It was a word that imagined there to be a community of Korea bloggers, who were connected, and that those connections meant something. One could (or at least, I did) talk about the "K-blogosphere" as if it were an organism, the way many Korea-bloggers like to talk about "Korea" as if the country were a character in a drama.

At that time, there were a handful of blogs that one could probably refer to as the go-to Korea blogs: a group of blogs that referred to each other, and that everybody kind of assumed everybody else was reading. We even met up sometimes. We teamed up on projects like The Hub of Sparkle. You could rattle off their names. Zenkimchi. Expat Jane. Scribblings of the Metropolitician. Korea Beat. The Grand Narrative. The Marmot's Hole. Gusts of Popular Feeling. Brian in Jeollanamdo. ROK Drop. A little before my time were The Big Hominid and a couple of others.  K-pop K-blogs created their own little ecosystem, led by Dramabeans and Allkpop and Eat Your Kimchi. Outside those "big ones" there were a swack of others that were a little less famous, but part of the web of connection, linked on the sidebars and in articles.

As time went by, more blogs, both "big" and "small" fell defunct, the bloggers repatriated or started repeating themselves or moved on to other projects or had kids, changed jobs, and got busy. Or the commenters went berzerk. Or people eventually noticed they sucked, or the authors found better ways to get attention/notoriety. A few bloggers got harassed and bullied into removing their blogs.

The very idea of a K-blogosphere has always had its skeptics. A few commenters, one who is a good friend now, always argued it was a stretch to call K-bloggers a community. This became more and more true as tumblr, twitter, reddit, Facebook groups and pages, vlogging and podcasting all came into their own, and each developed its own niche, and all the "original K-blogs" that vanished were replaced by newer blogs. Finally, there wasn't really a K-blogosphere anymore, but many. The tumblr k-blogosphere. The social justice K-blogosphere. The teaching K-blogosphere, the K-pop one. The foodie one. The military/security one, and they intersected less and less. Somewhere around the time ATEK imploded, I became disillusioned of the idea expat teachers could align their scattered interests. Likewise, I stopped believing expat blogger community could be called into existence simply by using the term K-blogosphere a lot. Little knots of convergence would remain, but social media seemed to supply quicker, richer connections, and seeking "likes" "shares" and "upvotes" was more fun than taking the effort of writing out blog posts and hoping for comments. Eventually, the very idea we needed a K-blogosphere kind of dissipated. Or maybe I just got married and decided to invest my energy in a different set and type of connections. I won't rule out that I'm just out of touch now, but I'm unwilling to participate in That. Facebook. Group. just to get dialed back in. So be it.

Through all that, there was one go-to, one lodestone in the ever-changing Korea blogosphere. Or maybe it was the last tent peg stopping the entire tarp from blowing away. For everyone who'd graduated Dave's and gotten bored of those Facebook groups where the new wave of teaching first-and-second-years k-eep k-omplaining, there remained The Marmot's Hole.

One of the original K-bloggers, Robert Koehler's blog went through a number of phases, but spent a longer period with a higher level of sustained output, popularity and relevance than any other Korea blog. And really, it wasn't even close. Robert Koehler has been cited by more major western news sources than any other Korea blogger and over a longer span of time, and he has also had more foreign journalists commenting and visiting his page. I don't think there is anybody who would dispute that. In December, The Marmot announced his retirement from blogging, and the last intersection of the increasingly dispersing venn diagram of Korea blog niches vanished. With The Marmot's retirement, I don't think the idea of "the big k-blogs" exists, or is a useful term anymore, and if it hasn't been for a while (probably the case), this is the locking of the door as it shuts.

It was a great run though, so my hat is off to The Marmot, Robert Koehler (you can see what he's doing now by following his photography tumblr). Everybody blogging in Korea owes him a debt, so thanks for the links, the fun, and for being the biggest tree in the wooly ecosystem that was the K-blogosphere for so many years.

Where to now? Who's to say? Now that all the touchstones have been pulled up, I think everybody's going to crawl further into their little niches. Nobody will be filling The Marmot's shoes. Dave's, Facebook and Reddit aren't generating the combination of diversity, cumulative knowledge of commenters and liveliness found at The Marmot's Hole. I expect things to continue fragmenting, and I expect that the best thing I get out of blogging (as has been the case for a few years now) is no longer some measure of fame (snicker) but the chance to send up a flag to find some small number of interesting, like-minded people to find me.

The Marmot's Hole is gone. I am sad that the archives have been pulled offline, for the sake of history. The other legacy I hope continues is this: The Marmot never claimed to be an expert, and often said that the longer he spent in Korea, the less he knew. I hope that kind of humility and uncertainty remains an undercurrent in the attitudes of future K-bloggers.  It's sure nicer to read than the pretense of unearned authority. But I'll take curiosity over the fear of saying anything substantive, if it comes to that. As for the comment boards... they're probably gone forever, and I don't think they're coming back.

Good luck in the future, Mr. Koehler.

The Comfort Women Deal A Month Later: Nothing New, Still Gross

When news of the latest "Final deal" regarding the Comfort Women came out on December 28, I wasn't as excited as a few of my Facebook friends. Sadly, my initial "Wait and see" reservations proved correct as the story soured faster than milk and pickle juice.

This topic is overwhelming to write about, because writing about any one aspect causes every single other thing to rush out for inclusion as well. It's like drinking a cup of jello: poke. Nothing. Poke. Nothing. Bigger poke. Omygoodnesseverythingiscomingatoncewhatwasithinking? Plus, no matter how carefully I write this piece, everything I omitted for simplicity or brevity will get thrown in my face in the comments anyway. It's daunting, and I'm frustrated at yet another apology doomed to be rejected both by Korea's and Japan's publics, followed by further recriminations, deepening grievance and apology/insincerity fatigue that will make it harder for both sides to offer and accept the next (hopefully final) apology, when or if it ever comes.

Source

More after the break.

Thoughts on Star Wars: The Force Awakens. Spoilers, durr.

There was a Star Wars movie out, did you hear?

It was pretty good, and it's making tonnes of money, so... there's that. I finally got to see it 10 days or so after it came out, thanks to report cards and stuff, but I liked it very well when I saw it.

There are spoilers in this article... but really, this long after the film came out, if you still haven't found a way to see it, I don't feel that bad about spoiling it for you. And if you're mad about spoilers this long after a film opened, next time take that energy you're using to be mad, and apply it to getting your butt to a cinema.

Late late screenings: worth it. And better, so that I don't have to take time away from the kid I should be hanging out with.

Juniorseyo watching Star Wars: He loved the original film "A New Hope"/Episode 4, and wanted to watch it again the weekend he first saw it. However, he hasn't wanted to watch it again since, so I'll wait till he's older before dropping The Empire Strikes Back.

Best thing: The three young heroes.

Give him his own spinoff movie: Poe Dameron, Oscar Isaac's ridiculously watchable, likeable pilot. He's assured and confident and high-spirited, like the resistance's best pilot probably really would be. He's the one I finished the movie wanting to hang out with.

But John Boyega! Yes. I like him a lot. Go see him in Attack the Block, a fantastic monster movie. He completely commands the screen.

I.New.Seoul.Slogan.Disappoint

I.Seoul.U.  World Taekwondo Federation.

How did we get here? Sometime in August, I heard Seoul City was taking submissions for a new slogan. Because Hi Seoul was three or four years old, and everybody knows branding works best when the brand image regularly changes into new and inexplicable images and ideas. Already then I winced in expectation of a new slogan choosing process that would be awful and annoying at every step of the way. I wish my call hadn't been so dead-on.