While I liked the Suicide Squad movie more than a lot of fans did, it certainly had its problems – one of which was that as the main antagonist, the Enchantress, grew more powerful, she became less scary:
However, in slight mitigation I think I know what they were going for; I suspect that her final appearance was intended as an homage to the Evil Maria in Metropolis:
This past year saw the release of two major theatrical film adaptations of works by Stephen King. One of them, It, has been a huge hit. The other, The Dark Tower, was much less successful.
Andy Muschetti, the director of It, has offered an explanation of why his film was more popular with audiences than The Dark Tower. According to Muschetti, it’s because It is first and foremost a story about “kids who are lonely and oppressed” and who “learn to get powerful by getting together”; hence “people connect” with It because “it’s a human story” where “the fantastic elements are sort of on the backburner.”
By contrast: “In The Dark Tower, we’re almost immediately invited to jump into this world of fantasy …. It’s just more genre, I think, and you can’t expect a massive audience to eagerly jump into that reality.”
Maybe Muschetti is just being gracious in victory, but c’mon. The Dark Tower didn’t fail because it started out too “genre” or because it asked audiences to “jump” straightaway into a “world of fantasy.” After all, the first Lord of the Rings movie started out with a battle of elves against a giant necromancer. The first episode of Game of Thrones started out with ice zombies in a wilderness on the far side of a 700-foot-high ice wall. I have a hard time imagining opening scenes more “genre” than those two; but audiences seem to have coped.
The Dark Tower failed because the filmmakers stripped out almost everything that was distinctive and haunting about the books and replaced it with generic crap. You know, I can’t even remember what the movie’s opening scene actually was. Whereas everyone who’s read the Dark Tower series remembers the first line of the first book.
The spaceship in the most recent episode of Agents of SHIELD looks to me like an homage to the work of Chris Foss:
From a recent episode of Lucifer:
“Well, what came first? Do angels’ powers shape their personalities, or are your personalities shaped by your powers?”
A related question: do these tv shows hire incompetent script editors, or are incompetent script editors hired by these tv shows?
The latest trailer for the upcoming film Ready Player One features this image – which is clearly a dark riff on the Vatican:
Here’s the real-life original:
Last weekend, at the Fox Theatre in Atlanta, I saw Love Never Dies (Andrew Lloyd Webber’s sequel to Phantom of the Opera) on its first North American tour. I enjoyed it, although the characterisations are wildly inconsistent (both within the show and between it and its predecessor).
They’ve revised the show a bit for its newest tour – though nothing as drastic as the total retooling between the UK and Australia productions. But, for example, the music for the song “The Beauty Underneath” has been completely rewritten. I like the new version; but I also miss the old version.
The set design is a bit different too – sort of a cross between Art Nouveau and “Pirates of the Caribbean” (the ride, not the movie).