Wonder Woman - in review...

What's it about?
The original superheroine finally gets her day in the realm of big budget blockbusters. This is the origin story of Diana, Princess of the Amazons, the warrior birthed of the Gods, who encounters mankind for the first time against the horrifying backdrop of World War I as she seeks to put an end to Ares, the God of War.
Who would I recognise in it?
Gal Gadot, Chris Pine, Robin Wright, Danny Huston, David Thewlis, Connie Nielson, Lucy Davis, Ewen Bremner, and others.
Great/Good/Alright/Shite?
It triumphed at the box office and was a critical success story (almost predictably so after the orchestrated clickbait bullying that Batman v Superman and Suicide Squad both received, pitched like some kind of Damascene conversion for DC) - but how does Wonder Woman sit outside all of the initial media interest and flash-in-the-pan obsession with box office numbers? The answer to gaining more female superheros in the genre is to create new, female superheros, not to lazily do an arbitrary bit of stunt writing to ask "what if this guy was a gal?" - because, if you really think about it, how insulting is that to everyone?

Newcomers to comics are disappointed to find that new releases aren't reflective of the hugely popular Marvel movies, while swapping the sex of an established character is a slap in the face to everyone. Not only is it a lazy move on the part of the writers and head honchos of the franchises, it also makes the suggestion that women aren't worthy of having their own custom-made superheroes. Furthermore, the binary sex-swap makes the insulting suggestion that women are incapable of enjoying male superheroes and that men are incapable of enjoying female superheroes, and that both can't find role models in the opposite sex - quite simply, that is utter bullshit.

Wonder Woman's history is a long one that pre-dates a vast swathe of rival Marvel's line-up of household names. Gal Gadot wowed in Batman v Superman (with a spine-tingling soundtrack riff to accompany her), and with DC getting a handle on their 'Expanded Universe', it was likely that Diana Prince's solo flick would turn out to be a cracker - and it certainly is. The film finds the perfect balance between DC's ability to 'go dark' (the merciless slaughter of World War I) and a sense of humour, warmth, and compassion...

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Flavours of the Month: March 2011...

LOOKS:

Born To Kill? - During my formative years, and being one of those teens who was obsessed with horror movies (not an awful lot has changed in the intervening years, then), I used to watch documentaries on Channel 5 about notorious serial killers - the real-life inspirations to some of the horror movies I would watch. This was back when Channel 5 was brand new and pretty much only showed softcore porn movies and aforementioned killer docs ... but fast forwarding to now I discovered, thanks to Sky Anytime, a series that began airing on the Crime & Investigation Channel about serial killers, ultimately concluding whether they were born to do the things they did or not. It's a fascinating series, although the constant re-use of certain footage and photos does begin to grate on the odd occasion.

Glory Daze - Apparently this comedy series about 1980s fraternity life isn't getting a second season, and you can kind of understand why, but at the same time - so far at least - it's an enjoyable enough distraction.

Shutter Island - Early in the month it was put on Sky Premiere so I figured I'd give it a third viewing, and sure enough there were still things that I was picking up that I'd missed the first two times around. I'm really quite fond of this film.

Nedroid, and Romantically Apocalyptic web comics - I'm a big fan of the Cyanide & Happiness web comic, and through them I was introduced to these two other web comics which both tickled me. Particularly the latter, which is beautifully crafted in its illustration of a whimsical, semi-deluded air to an apocalypse.

SOUNDS:

Alan Wake OST - I find this soundtrack helps me get my head into the right tone of late, as I have been mapping out my next feature length script "Allen Bridge".

Staind "Break The Cycle", and "14 Shades of Grey" - Perusing my CD collection I rediscovered these sitting way down at the bottom of the stack, having got them the best part of a decade ago. So I gave them another spin for old time's sake.

CKY Infiltrate Destroy Rebuild - I love me some CKY, I even got to see them live at my University (it was a bloody good show, too), and with their newest track "Afterworld" getting a lot of airing on my playlist, I returned to this spiffing album (the video version of the album is also bloody good).

VIBES & FLAVOURS:

Allen Bridge - My next feature length script, and I'm really planning-the-hell out of it. Characterisation, town history, motivations, impediments, the three-act-structure - the lot. I'm getting close to finishing the prep work - which has been handled on-and-off over the last 10 months (I found myself having fits-and-starts of productivity with interluded bouts of struggling) - and in the past month I've really broken the back of this thing and explored entirely new territory that I never considered when I first came up with the idea. It's been like taking a lump of clay and crafting it into a sculpture, as what was once a fairly unclear vision has evolved into a deeply considered project. Indeed I plan to follow the writing process on this blog as I go, so keep an eye out for that.

Project Gotham Racing 4 - Lacking any new games to play (plenty of interesting ones are out there, but certainly not at prices I'm willing to pay for them), I broke the cycle of first-and-third-person-shooters, and sandboxers, by returning to good old PGR.

The next educational DVD project - On the topic of Abortion, this will be the next series of educational films that I'll be putting together, similar to the likes of Just War (which was screened at the Borderlines Film Festival this month), so it's been all-hands-on-deck to gather enough footage and photographs to turn the words in the script into moving images. Naturally with a topic such as this, finding footage can be a bit of a struggle, and so we'll be going for a slightly more abstract and metaphorical approach this time around. For me as the editor it's shaping up to be an intriguing visual challenge.