#but I think ANY death having a big amount of fanfare / being a big dramatic thing really toes that propaganda line

[latibvles]

ah . found the “WHY DID CURT’S DEATH HAVE NO FANFARE” post . [clenched teeth strained smile]

[the-desolated-quill]

Sonic Vs Harley: Send In The Hedgehogs - Quill’s Scribbles

Unless you’ve been meditating in the desert for the past couple of weeks, you’ll know that there’s a bloody epidemic going on in the world right now. The coronavirus outbreak has dramatically changed our very way of life for the foreseeable future, and us plebs have been having to get used to all these alien concepts such as social distancing, self isolation, vaccines being good and Gal Gadot murdering John Lennon with a tuneless rendition of ‘Imagine.’ These are scary and uncertain times we live in, and this goes double for the movie industry as productions are halted and/or delayed, and cinemas around the globe are shutting shop. This means that streaming services, initially dismissed by pompous filmmakers like Steven Spielberg as being lesser than cinema, has now become Hollywood’s saving grace. Oh the irony!

But I’m not here to talk about that. Today I’m here to talk about how a blue CGI hedgehog seems to be more profitable than Margot Robbie.

Jokes aside, this is actually a fascinating topic of discussion in my opinion. Both Sonic The Hedgehog and Birds Of Prey (I categorically refuse to type the whole title because I’ve got better shit to be doing other than trying to remember how the fuck you spell ‘fantabulous’) were released within a week of each other just as the coronavirus outbreak was gathering steam, and yet the box office earnings of both films are poles apart. Sonic has now become the highest grossing video game movie of all time and is, at the time I’m typing this, the second highest grossing film of the year, beating even Disney Pixar’s new film Onward if you can believe it, whereas Birds Of Prey... well... it’s not exactly flopped as such. The film’s low budget protected it from that, but it’s hardly what you’d call a success, making just shy of the $200 million it would need to break even. How did this happen? Especially when you consider that public opinion of both films a year ago would have you believe that the opposite would have happened. Everyone was massively excited for Birds Of Prey, especially after the string of successes DC have had with Aquaman, Shazam and most recently Joker, whereas Sonic...

...yeah, lets not talk about that.

Now before we start, let me just make absolutely clear that this is just my opinion. Mu subjective opinion. Normally I’d expect my readers to be smart enough to know this, but I’m talking about a DC movie here and I know from personal experience how ‘passionate’ a certain tin foil hat wearing portion of that fanbase can be sometimes. You may recall back in 2016 I received rape and death threats when I had the gall to say that I didn’t enjoy watching Suicide Squad. You know? That beloved classic that nobody fucking remembers or talks about anymore? Also there was that time when Harley Quinn fans started spreading fake rumours that the Sonic movie was homophobic in the hopes of salvaging Birds Of Prey’s box office earnings. And yes, I know it’s not all DCEU fans that are like this, etc. etc., but considering that it only ever seems to be DC fans that pull shit like this, you’ll forgive me if I’m not exactly in a very generous mood right now. Basically, if you’ve seen Birds Of Prey and liked it, that’s great. More power to you. I’m not even suggesting that Birds Of Prey is a bad movie. I’m just exploring the reasons why I think the film may have underperformed and why, possibly, Sonic The Hedgehog overtook them despite outside circumstances. This is not fact. This is just my opinion. It’s my opinion. An opinion. A subjective opinion. It’s my opinion. Okay? Okay.

Also I should point out that out of the two films, I’ve only seen Sonic, not Birds Of Prey. Believe it or not, this will be relevant later on. Again, this is not about the quality of either film. This is merely my subjective observations regarding their respective marketing and box office performance.

So why, according to the fans and the media, did Birds Of Prey underperform at the box office? There are three popular reasons for this. The first is obviously the coronavirus. Less people willing to leave the house and buy a ticket, therefore less box office earnings. Makes sense, but I don’t think that’s the whole story. Lets not forget, Sonic The Hedgehog came out a week after Birds Of Prey and practically steamrolled over the competition despite coronavirus fears. So I’m not entirely convinced of this. The second reason is that Birds Of Prey only has niche appeal because it’s based on a lesser known comic book property. Again, makes sense, but so was Guardians Of The Galaxy and Deadpool, and they were both hugely successful. Obviously I’m not saying Birds Of Prey needed to be as big as those movies. Even if it just made the same amount of money as Shazam did, it would have been successful, but it didn’t. The third reason is good old fashioned sexism, and yes, I agree that may have been a contributing factor, but I think it’s naive to place all the blame on the anti-SJWs who feel threatened by a gang of women kicking butt. Look at the 2016 reboot of Ghostbusters for example. That film received a tirade of misogynistic comments from butthurt fanboys, but it still made roughly the same amount of money at the box office as the original Ghostbusters did. The reason it flopped wasn’t because of the fanboys, but because of Sony spending a stupid amount of money on the thing in the hopes of jumpstarting a shared universe. If Ghostbusters 2016 had the same budget as Birds Of Prey, Sony would be laughing their way to the bank right now.

No I think there’s a little bit more going on here. Lets bring Sonic into the discussion and explore it, shall we?

The most blatantly obvious reason for Sonic’s success and Birds Of Prey’s relative failure is the age rating. Sonic is a PG, family friendly film with a cuddly animal as its main character. The film even stars Jim Carrey being his usual goofy self. Kids love this shit and parents will no doubt be prepared to risk a zombie apocalypse to let their kids see it. Birds Of Prey, on the other hand, is a hard R. Strong bloody violence, sexual references, everyone says ‘fuck’ a lot. No kids allowed. Of course that hasn’t stopped films like Deadpool or Joker being such giant hits, but they didn’t have to contend with a global pandemic. Plus, according to what I’ve heard from certain critics, apparently Birds Of Prey’s R rating doesn’t seem wholly justified. That if you were to cut back on the swearing and the gore, it would make no difference to the film. Now you see this is something I’ve been afraid would happen ever since Deadpool’s surprise success back in 2016. That studios and filmmakers would take the wrong lessons from it and make their films R rated just for the sake of making them R rated. We see this with movie studios all the time. One studio finds success and suddenly everyone tries to copy it without considering why it was successful in the first place. The reason Deadpool as well as other R rated films like Logan and Joker worked is because the films justified their R ratings. You couldn’t have told the same story without that R rating. An R rated Harley Quinn doesn’t seem necessary, especially when you consider that there have been Harley Quinn adaptations before that did just as well without being strictly for adults. Hell, the original Harley Quinn story from the Batman animated series was PG rated. So the inclusion of a R rating feels less like a genuine artistic choice and more like trend chasing. And now that Joker has become the most profitable comic book movie ever made, I fear this is only going to get worse in the future.

Another factor that needs to be considered is audiences’ trust and expectation. Sonic The Hedgehog’s journey to the big screen has in some ways become the classic redemption story. After the initial reveal of Sonic the Manhog, fans were understandably pissed off that a beloved video game icon was given such a grotesque re-imagining for the sake of ‘realism’ (snort). As a result of the backlash, the director Jeff Fowler announced they would revise the design and the film was postponed for three months in order to fix it. The result was a Sonic design much closer to the games and this generated a lot of goodwill from the fans. Subsequent trailers were much better received and there was a lot more positive buzz around the movie. Birds Of Prey on the other hand demonstrated the inverse of this. Everyone was hugely excited, but as we got closer and closer to the date of release, audience anticipation began to wane. The trailers received little fanfare. In fact a lot of people were largely unimpressed by it. Why?

Well first we should address the elephant in the room. The fact of the matter is Sonic has a bigger and much more passionate fanbase than Harley does. That’s not to say Harley isn’t a popular character. She is. But I think Warner Bros and DC seriously overestimated how much people wanted to see Harley Quinn get her own movie. She may have been the best thing about Suicide Squad, but considering what a total trainwreck Suicide Squad was, that’s hardly saying much, is it? I mean the villain Sandman was the best thing about Sam Raimi’s Spider-Man 3. That doesn’t mean I want a whole movie based on him. It just means out of all the things I hated about Spider-Man 3, Sandman was the thing I hated least.

And that’s another thing. The fact that Birds Of Prey didn’t try to distance themselves from Suicide Squad I don’t think did them any favours. While Suicide Squad was a commercial success at the time, people haven’t exactly been kind to the film in subsequent years. I mean feel free to read my review of Suicide Squad for an exhaustive list of reasons why the film was less than enjoyable to sit through. One dimensional characters, poor editing, ugly colour palette, casual sexism, David Ayer trying desperately to look cool and edgy, I could go on. So when the first trailers for Birds Of Prey came out and we saw the neon colour scheme and Hot Topic wardrobes make a comeback, I can’t have been the only one who was slightly put off.

Which leads me to the biggest issue of all and that’s the stonking unoriginality of the whole thing. For all their boasting about how feminist and progressive they are, what is it about Birds Of Prey that makes it stand out from other comic book films? Granted Sonic wasn’t wholly original either, but at least they had the novelty of a blue CGI hedgehog to piggyback off of. Birds Of Prey really doesn’t have anything if you think about it. Here’s the impression I got from the trailers. It has the same aesthetics as Suicide Squad, so already I’m getting PTS style flashbacks, and its story doesn’t seem all that intriguing or unique. Think about it. A violent anti-hero has to protect a delinquent child from some sadistic big baddie. How many times have we seen that done in these films? Terminator 2, Deadpool 2, Logan, even Ghost Rider has told this story before. The fact that the characters in question happen to be women doesn’t change a damn thing. They even have Harley Quinn breaking the fourth wall. Like... guys, come on! Surely we can do something more original than this! It feels like the only thing Birds Of Prey has going for it is that its main protagonists are all women. But after the likes of Wonder Woman and Captain Marvel, that’s no longer a real selling point anymore. You need something else to entice people. Something that Birds Of Prey sorely lacks.

Now I’m sure any Birds Of Prey fans reading this must be getting pissed off at me, so I’d just like to remind everyone yet again that I’m not necessarily saying Birds Of Prey is a bad film. I wouldn’t know. I haven’t seen it. And that’s kind of my point. A week or so ago, my friend and I knew this was probably going to be our last opportunity to go to the cinema for quite some time, so we knew we had to make our choice of film count. We had a choice between Sonic The Hedgehog and Birds Of Prey, and we ended up going to see Sonic. We don’t regret it. We had a good time watching Sonic. It was a fun movie, well made and surprisingly moving at points. (interesting to note, Sonic also has the main protagonist protecting a child plot, but unlike the films I mentioned, Sonic’s story is told from the perspective of the kid. It’s a little thing, but it’s enough to make the whole thing feel fresh and unique because it’s something not even the games tend to acknowledge. Sonic is a kid and the film plays around with that, which adds to its overall charm). Maybe Birds Of Prey is a better movie than Sonic. I don’t know. But that’s not what this is about. When picking which film we would watch, it was the factors I mentioned before that we considered and I suspect what many other people took into consideration too. Basically we looked at these two films and thought to ourselves which one would we be prepared to go outside and risk our health for in order to see it in a cinema. In the end, Sonic won because, out of the two films, it looked more exciting and more unique than Birds Of Prey, and ultimately we trusted that this film could deliver what it promised. Is that fair? Probably not, but sadly that’s often how these things play out. 

Birds Of Prey may have had a good critical reception, but it ultimately shot itself in the foot thanks to some of its creative and marketing decisions. And if studios take anything away from all this, it should be that relying solely on the gender of the main characters as a means to sell something just doesn’t cut it anymore.

[pass-the-bechdel]

Orphan Black season five full review

How many episodes pass the Bechdel test?

100% (ten of ten).

What is the average percentage per episode of female characters with names and lines?

57.62%

How many episodes have a cast that is at least 40% female?

All ten. Eight have a cast over 50% female, and four have over 60%.

How many episodes have a cast that is less than 20% female?

Zero, obviously.

How many female characters (with names and lines) are there?

Thirty-one. Eighteen who appear in more than one episode, twelve who appear in at least half the episodes, and three who appear in all the episodes.

How many male characters (with names and lines) are there?

Twenty-eight. Seventeen who appear in more than one episode, eight who appear in at least half the episodes, and zero who appear in every episode.

Positive Content Status:

As per usual with this show, it’s convinced that just having a lot of women around makes it a great feminist work, but its obsession with female biology and the reek of disdain for it kinda undercut that concept (average rating of 2.9).

General Season Quality:

It suuucks. Full of plot contrivances that go nowhere, random and useless events and characters, and vital development inexplicably happening off-screen while we’re stuck watching episode filler. This is a great season to watch if you want to make a list of all the things you should never do in a narrative.

MORE INFO (and potential spoilers) under the cut:

So, how about that Westmoreland bullshit? With the random old dude who they set up like some ultimate bogeyman, but then it turned out he was a fake and that all the dramatic science talk associated with his little island society was fabrication and the beast-man in the woods was inconsequential and the whole plot took half a season to resolve into actually just a smokescreen for the absence of any plot of actual value? But then they kept the bogeyman anyway so that he could STILL be treated like the ultimate villain whose death signals the freedom of the clones for, um, some reason? Why did they even bother having Susan Duncan survive last season’s stabbing just so she could have her her scientific creator position bizarrely retroactively usurped by ‘Westmoreland’ before she gets killed off for real? Why did they bring back Coady, at all?? Just to pretend that the idiotic Castor sterilisation plot could wedge sideways into a weak endgame idea of implausible longevity-science that doesn’t even exist yet in-story? How about Kira Manning, plot device? Remember how Felix got turfed for half the season so that he could money-trail his way to taking down a shadowy corporate cabal through completely off-screen shenanigans, because actually SEEING the machinations that bring about the culmination of a story is for wimps? Remember how Alison conveniently went soul-searching for half the season so that they didn’t have to write plot for her at all, and then she reappeared with a new haircut and threw out her old personality and still did nothing plot-relevant? I half suspected it wasn’t really her, guys. I thought they were playing some wacky twist where some eleventh-hour evil clone was pulling a Sarah and impersonating Alison, only doing it really badly with stupid hair. Tatiana Maslany is a talented actor, but I’ve mentioned before how huge a role character design plays in selling the idea that you’re looking at a different person, and damn, she did NOT sell me on the idea that she was still Alison, but with a new look. It’s small potatoes compared to the myriad other sins of the season, but it’s just such a dumb thing to fuck up. 

Meanwhile...how about how they brought MK back for one episode only, so that she could do nothing and then be violently murdered? Doesn’t stink like cheap drama at all. Neither does bringing back Gracie Johannssen for one episode and then killing her too, even though it’s illogical for her to return to the series, especially at this awfully-convenient moment. Mark was imminently dying for months and also under the impression that Coady was dead, how did they last-minute make contact with her, get coerced into finding Helena in order to get a cure, AND just-so-happen to know where to look? And then Mark dies too, without even discovering that Grace is dead, both characters just being deleted without fanfare. Cheap drama. As noted, Mark was already dying, so bringing him back to do it onscreen changes nothing, but Grace was eighteen years old, raised in an abusive cult, rendered barren - putting a bullet in her brain now for absolutely no narrative purpose is just cruel. Like MK’s death, and a little like Susan’s as well, the main drive seems to be some writer’s desire to create drama by unnecessarily and excessively harming women, to the point of death. Life is torturous and awful, they lose everything they ever had or valued, and then they get murdered. It comes off pretty misogynistic, to be honest. Pointless murders of female characters tend to get that air about them. Siobhan’s death at least feels earned in-story, insofar as we all expect the characters to lose a close ally by the end and Siobhan has always been the kind of character who plays the hard game and knows she’s more likely to run out of luck than to retire in peace. Coady, also, earned her way to a death (though she should have got it back in season three instead of being revived to finish out the series), however it is, again, a bit weird that she ends up playing second villain-fiddle to a man with no narrative credentials, no pull, and no reason why she - or Susan - should answer to him since both are aware that he’s a fraud. That, also, has a kind of misogynistic smell about it, like someone got antsy about the idea that these female scientists were being given the credit for creating the clones and decided they needed a master. Apparently, they also forgot about Ethan Duncan’s participation, which is doubly weird because he was anti-Neolution. Then again, they forgot that the clone projects were government-sanctioned with military oversight, too, so the whole ‘crazy dude on an island is the Big Bad in Charge’ doesn’t make sense. They also forgot that Coady didn’t know about the Castor pathogen until like, a few months before that plot started happening, so that could never have been her secret plan to sterilise everyone but the 1% who buy into Neolution science or whatever dumbfuck plot they pretended was going on in the end. Remember when this show was actually about clones, briefly, and it almost seemed like there was a plot?

Any discussion of the way a story ends tends to become a discussion of the story as a whole, so I’m not gonna drag this out. If you watched this season yourself, just, think about it: how many of the characters in this season had story arcs? How many of them impacted the plot in a meaningful way that drove the story forward? What was the story that drove forward, anyway? What can you separate out from that oft-maligned unnecessary, cheap drama, the plot events and threads that go nowhere and are not important to the central story or even tangentially to the development of characters who are important to the central story? Even in a season of only ten episodes, for a series which is making a planned ending and therefore should be at its narrative tightest as they squeeze in all the necessary stuff to theoretically finish in a coherent and rewarding way that ties off loose ends and concludes character journeys? How much of it actually needed to be there? It’s really slim pickings, guys. There’s a shocking amount of wasted time in there. I am BAFFLED that there are people who legitimately enjoyed this and thought it was deep. Diff’rent strokes for diff’rent folks and all, but honestly. Baffled. I’m taking the rest to the full season review.