Review: Batman Vs. Superman: Dawn Of Justice

I've come to the conclusion in life that it's best to completely skip all trailers, commercials, hype ads, and other media when it comes to things I think I might enjoy.    I'm willing to watch one trailer to simply see what a movie might offer and learn that it might actually be something I want to know more about, but beyond that there's so little value to them beyond "revealing the entire plot."

However, I did say in that previous post that I would see both movies, and I've lived up to exactly half of that promise by going out and seeing the story of a guy with an armored suit battle a guy who's a walking atomic powerhouse.

So what did I think?  Well, look after the cut, and be prepared for spoilers.

Captain America: Civil War & Batman Vs. Superman: Dawn Of Justice Trailers are out!

And I could not be more "enh."

Don't get me wrong, I'll probably see both movies, but I have to say, watching the trailers reminds me why, for the most part, I don't watch trailers.  They either reveal way too much or they don't reveal anything and leave you guessing.

Let me go into a bit more detail.

Batman: Arkham Origins

A funny thing happened while I was playing Batman: Arkham Origins.  Set five years before the original Batman: Arkham Asylum game, we see a young, fresh-faced massively bitter Bruce Wayne still enjoying the "Batman is a myth" aspect of being a costumed do-gooder who only goes out at night, while the cops are determined to stop the rise in crime committed by people in colorful outfits as well as take in this crazed mercenary dressed like Dracula but understanding the whole "transforms into a bat, not dresses like one" thing.

You have the same game play as in previous games, with a few little touches here and there.  Batman's more of a rookie, so he doesn't have quite the same massive skill set, though he's still busting out double take downs when he couldn't do it in the original game.

But here's the funny thing.

Halfway through the game, I stopped having fun.

And I think I could pretty much just leave the review there and call it a night, but I think I need to explain why I stopped having fun.

Discussion Points: Should Superheroes Kill?

There's a trend that seems to come up now and again in comic books regarding superheroes and their tactics.  People keep asking "why doesn't Batman just kill the Joker?"  "Why doesn't Captain America just kill <insert name of Nazi who keeps reappearing here>?"  "Why didn't Power Pack ever kill off Crazy Legs?"

Four white kids killing a black(ish) guy?  He probably had it coming.

Well, let's talk about this, and I'll give my opinion on it.

Review - Batman: Gotham Knight

Batman is a cultural icon.  He has thrived in comic books, newspaper strips, movies, video games, television shows, radio shows, campfire stories, toys, postage stamps, novels, and I'm willing to bet that somewhere out there is a form of Batman being used in a safety video for an office.

However.

If the Dark Knight has a format he's done consistently well in, it's animation.  The Batman: The Animated Series show completely changed the look at Batman, telling stories appropriate for children and adults, and forever cementing the idea of Kevin Conroy as the voice of Bruce Wayne (rather than Christian Bale's guttural shout)  and Mark Hamill as the Clown Prince Of Crime.  It's the series that took Mr. Freeze and turned him into an iconic character.  It introduced us to Harley Quinn.  It opened the doors for a Superman series and then a Justice League series.

While the movies have gone their own way, it's felt as of late that the DC animation department is floundering a bit.  They're doing animated versions of all the latest big events, but they still have regular Batman cartoons coming out on DVD.  The problem is there isn't a coherent timeline for these stories, with some taking place in the original animated series universe, others taking place in their own realities, and some just trying to keep up with the books or film and feeling rushed because of it.

I finally got around to watching the Batman: Gotham Knight DVD, and while it wasn't bad by any means, I just felt rather underwhelmed.

Valentine's Week! Day One ... of one?

Let's discuss novelty desk calendars.  See, I think they have the perfect racket going, because most people don't retain all sorts of information for very long.  That means they could, presumably, reissue the exact same calendar every year with the dates and days corrected and just have the same Dilbert strips looping forever.  In f-

Wait a minute.

According to mine, it says today's Valentine's Day.

OH MAN, I TOTALLY FORGOT VALENTINE'S WEEK!

Man, now I have to cram five days worth of Valentine's related topics into one post!  Okay, okay, I can do this.  Here we go!

Ask Erik: Episode Forty-Seven

Here at Ask Erik, we've spent a lot of time reading books and comics, watching movies and TV shows, and browsing through the Internet in the hopes of finding the answers to life's biggest mysteries.  Who had the original idea for a lottery?  Why do some cottons itch but others don't?  Why can't American TV programs do short seasons with clear beginnings, middles, and endings like British TV?

I mean, seriously, why would I watch Under The Dome when the mystery is "will they get out of the dome" and I can figure they probably aren't going anywhere if there's going to be a second season?  I mean, unless it's a metaphorical dome, but that'd be stupid.

Having instead amassed a vault of useless knowledge stored in his head, Erik instead tackles your questions and tries to find the answers you care about (or a reasonable facsimile).  Or, if you don't care, he'll at least try to make you laugh and forget you just wasted time you could spend doing anything else.

To Erik: You seem to like things that are "insane" but not "stupid."  What's the most insane comic you ever read?

Ask Erik: Episode Thirty!

Normally here I fill in the standard two paragraphs about having a vault of useless information and positing some questions of which two tend to be ones that require thought and the other is something completely random.  However, seeing as how this is my thirtieth "Ask Erik" it feels a bit like a milestone.  Maybe it's because my "Ask Eriks" are officially approaching middle age.  Maybe it's that I'm also just three posts away from my 200th post since I first created this blog.

Either way, today seems like a good day to do something special, so I'm going to answer two questions, both of which were given to me on Facebook.  Two questions so nerdy, I might spontaneously grow tape on the bridge of my glasses.

Let's rock.

Ask Erik: Episode Twenty-Eight

Here at Ask Erik, we've spent a lot of time reading books and comics, watching movies and TV shows, and browsing through the Internet in the hopes of finding the answers to life's biggest mysteries.  Why can you ship a coconut without it counting as "perishable" but not honey or maple syrup?  How many hats is "too many" hats?  Have there been any movies where Johnny Depp doesn't wear eye makeup?

Having instead amassed a vault of useless knowledge stored in his head, Erik instead tackles your questions and tries to find the answers you care about (or a reasonable facsimile).  Or, if you don't care, he'll at least try to make you laugh and forget you just wasted time you could spend doing anything else.

Ask Erik: Episode Thirteen ...Part 2! Wait, what?

Here at Ask Erik, we've spent a lot of time reading books and comics, watching movies, and browsing through the Internet in the hopes of finding the answers to life's biggest mysteries.  Can spiritual peace be found in a technology-driven world?  Is aberrant behavior simply genetics or upbringing?  How can V8 Fusion be really healthy if the first two ingredients are water and high fructose corn syrup?

Having instead amassed a vault of useless knowledge stored in his head, Erik instead tackles your questions and tries to find the answers you care about (or a reasonable facsimile).  Or, if you don't care, he'll at least try to make you laugh and forget you just wasted time you could spend doing anything else.

Ask Erik: Episode Twelve...Part One?

Here at Ask Erik, we've spent a lot of time reading books and comics, watching movies, and browsing through the Internet in the hopes of finding the answers to life's biggest mysteries.  When will man be able to travel to Mars?  What life exists at the deepest points of the ocean?  Why did they cancel Crystal Pepsi?

Seriously, that stuff was good.

Having instead amassed a vault of useless knowledge stored in his head, Erik instead tackles your questions and tries to find the answers you care about (or a reasonable facsimile).  Or, if you don't care, he'll at least try to make you laugh and forget you just wasted time you could spend doing anything else.

Ask Erik: Episode Eleven

Here at Ask Erik, we've spent a lot of time reading books and comics, watching movies, and browsing through the Internet in the hopes of finding the answers to life's biggest mysteries.  Is there anything beyond the edge of the universe?  Could technology advance to the point where it surpasses us as the "masters" of this world?  Why does Adam Sandler keep getting to star in movies? 

Having instead amassed a vault of useless knowledge stored in his head, Erik instead tackles your questions and tries to find the answers you care about (or a reasonable facsimile).  Or, if you don't care, he'll at least try to make you laugh and forget you just wasted time you could spend doing anything else.

Ask Erik: Episode Eight

Here at Ask Erik, we realize there are questions that are so important, so integral to our culture that they need to be addressed in a forum outside the public eye, where honesty can be delivered in such a way as to be able to infiltrate society, plant its roots, and start a revolution.

And then there's questions about nerdy stuff that are just there to have fun with.

Comic Spotlight: Batman: Going Sane

I like comic books.

Phew, it's good to get that off my chest.  Keeping that secret buried has haunted me, keeping me awake at nights and making me pull away from those close to me.  Thankfully, I think I kept it hidden well enough that nobody noticed up until now.  I mean, sure, the signs were there, but I think that only in hindsight will people realize it was always there.

But back to the point, I like comic books, and I particularly like great comic books.  Now, a "great" comic book can mean a lot of things.  It can be an in-depth analysis of a character, something that we can compare to our own strengths and flaws to see what kind of person we are.  It could be a metaphor for an aspect of society, or simply a careful analysis of how people who are blessed with means beyond normal people can function in today's society.  Sometimes it's just Nikola Tesla's robot fighting a (supposedly) time-traveling dinosaur.

Man, Atomic Robo's a great book.

Anyway.  Today I'm going to spotlight a look at one of Batman's greatest villains.  The Joker has been portrayed a multitude of ways in all sorts of media, from a bumbling goofball with elaborate deathtraps, a crime boss who just robs things with a clown motif, a psychopath willing to murder people just to see if anybody gets the joke, and a complete and total anarchist, as in the movie The Dark Knight.

And soon I'm going to tell you all why everybody who thinks the Joker was the embodiment of randomness and chaos in that movie was flat-out wrong.  But that's for another day.

Right now, we're going to stick with the "homicidal" aspect of the Joker, and see what happens when he gets the one thing he truly wants: the death of Batman.  I present: Going Sane.

Now, I'm not going to spoil the book, because it's worth reading on its own grounds, but I'll lay out the basic premise.  The Joker is up to another high-profile crime (seriously, the guy never does anything with subtlety, even stealing some kid's report card to make him cry.)  Batman confronts him and things go horribly wrong.  The Joker kills Batman, dumps his body in a river...and has no purpose anymore.  After all, as the book says, "It's a role I've been playing to keep the audience amused.  But the audience is gone now.  The theater's empty.  And I don't have to play anymore."

Now, I don't have the image here to share, but if you do read this, watch the font of the thought boxes on the pages of this comic.  The transition from the Joker's usual hen-scratched thoughts to smooth font is both startling and scary, we're not sure if we're watching a man completely lose it, or actually manage to get his thoughts together.

The book does a great job of portraying Batman and the Joker as the ultimate enemies, as long as one exists, the other also has to be.  In this instance, the book suddenly turns into a magazine following Joseph Kerr as he tries to make a life for himself, meets a woman, and falls in love, all while still having nightmare of two terrible figures haunting him.

It's a book that examines a fine line between sanity and insanity for this character, and there are some truly heartbreaking moments, such as watching "Joseph" attempt to smile, not like a lunatic, but as a normal person would, trying to keep that other side of him pushed down.

Now, of course Batman does come back, which of course means the Joker needs to come back as well.  The book manages to detail the lives both Batman and the Joker could have if they just put away their ridiculous costumes and toys and simply rejoined society, but as long as both parties live (and one knows the other is alive), the cycle never ends.

But it's that length of time between these meetings that are the most fascinating, and make this a truly great book to pick up.  I have the collected edition as well as the individual comics (one is for reading, one is for stashing away), and I suggest anybody who likes a good look into the mind of a psychopath (especially one that makes you feel bad for said psycho) give it a try.

I'll even loan you my reading copy if you want.  What have you got to lose?

Reviewing is Magic: Interlude!

Before I get started reviewing the fifth episode of My Little Pony: Friendship is Magic, I wanted to take a closer look at one particular aspect of the show.  This time, I'm looking at the title sequence.

Now, a proper opening needs to do several things.  It needs to entice new viewers to stay with visualsGargoyles, Duck Tales, Transformers, Batman, My Little Pony, My Little Pony: Friendship Is Magic, Hammerman and music.  It needs to show you the characters, and- you know, I can summarize this much easier with the following:  An introduction needs to introduce you to the series.

Now, some series take this to mean it needs to retell the origin of the series.  Many cartoons from the 80s and 90s took this approach, and I can't think of any opening that did this better than Disney's Gargoyles.

That opening is, essentially, the first five episodes of the series in a nutshell.  You have the deep voice of Keith David laying out how creatures from a thousand years ago are now in modern day (90s) New York, the differences between the two worlds, and also provides some glimpses of the kind of action and story you can look forward to ("We are defenders of the night!").

But it's not perfect.  It presents to us David Xanatos, both as the guy shocked when the Gargoyles come to life, as well as being involved in a fist fight with Goliath.  We don't know if he's a hero, a villain, or if it's complicated (spoiler alert: it's complicated).  Strangely enough, we only see some of the other main characters in passing, without really knowing anything about them.  Bronx the gargoyle dog (still not sure how that worked) gets more opening sequence time than Hudson, Brooklyn, Lexington, or Broadway.  In fact, the only time you see Hudson is his backside while he swoops down a couple of times.

It also has the problem that while it works for the first season or so, things tended to change rather quickly and rather severely in that show (to the point where most of one season was spent focused on three characters nowhere near New York City).  But I digress.

This approach doesn't always work, though.  I mean, just look at this riveting origin story:

Ugh.

Now, doing an opening that introduces you to the cast can get even more complex when you have a ridiculous number of characters.  I present Transformers.

If I watched that for the first time, having never seen a Transformer before in my life, I'd probably be excused for assuming that the jet fighters were the robots of the purple-logo guys, and that one dude with a giant arm cannon was some kind of heavy weapons side character.  And it gets even more confusing in the second season:

Seriously, all I can pick up is that there's a lot of robots shooting at each other, and one turns from a train into the space shuttle.  And maybe some are bigger than others.  I know they fight, but I don't know where, I don't know anything about the world, and it's just a jumbled mess (something, sadly, the current films decided to take to heart.  But that's another review series for another time).  If I saw the Gargoyles theme before the season 2 opening, I might think they were also doing a history of robot wars, starting with when robot dinosaurs fought each other, and how it evolved into

So we've looked at one decent one, three insane ones.  Let's look at some great ones.  And when I think of the two best cartoon openings, I think of Duck Tales and Batman: The Animated Series.

Yes, fine, it's the opening and ending credits, but whatever.  It is, by my accounts, almost perfect in how it presents the show.  We have a primary setting (Duckburg, complete with giant money bin on top), it presents our characters (Scrooge, who has a ridiculous amount of money, the kids, a pilot, some kind of scientist guy who rides horses, a woman with a raven, and dog people), but most of all it tells you what kind of stories you'll be getting.  Listen to the lyrics and look at how they play with the visuals.

"Race cars, lasers, aeroplanes."  "Might solve a mystery, or rewrite history."   "Tales of daring do bad and good luck tales."  I could go on, but these lines are perfect with the visuals.  We have dark castles, giant robots, jungles, cavemen, anything could happen on this show, and it's always an adventure.

More than that, it also tells us about the world.  Look at the "race car" or "aeroplane" they show.  It lets us know that while there might be a laser gun and a duck equivalent to Robocop wandering around, it also has an older feel to it.  It's all the flash of the modern world with a more vintage feel, a call back to the classic movie serials where, sure, you could expect to find hidden temples full of gold or a monastery full of rubies tucked away in mountains. 

It lays it all out and says, "this is our world.  Come on an adventure with us."  And every child wanted to.

Now, I might not do the best job ever explaining why the Batman: The Animated Series opening theme is great, but a lot of the same arguments carry over.  We're presented with the world, a mixture of modern and classic design (when is the last time you saw a police blimp patrolling the sky?), and the basic premise of the show (when criminals commit crime, a guy in a costume shows up and beats the crap out of them, and he has a sweet car).

It doesn't go into a lot of depth about who all the secondary characters are, but it doesn't need to.  Save for later in the series when villains would randomly pop up in another character's story, the story itself would tell you who these secondary characters were, and it did it brilliantly. 

So, let's look at the opening to My Little Pony.

The first thing I want to point out is that this show comes damn close to meeting up with the other two shows I said got it right in how it introduces the series.  From the very opening notes, we're provided with a simple transition from one location (yes, "the sky" is a location, but in the background you clearly see a large, mystical castle attached to a mountain) to another (Ponyville).  Our character even arrives in a hot air balloon, a means of transport best utilized by wizards who travel from the "normal" world to Oz, except this time in reverse (you'll know that the cloud "barrier" between the two areas is broken by Rainbow Dash.  Coincidence?).

In that brief glimpse of the area, we're shown a lot of the major sites of the show, as well.  We zip past Applejack's apple orchard into the village, with looming mountains in the distance.  Once we're in the village, we're even presented with a simple, basic approach to technology in this world.  Thatch-roofed houses, trains that still seem to be powered by steam, and no lampposts, cars, or other major indicators of electricity to be seen.  This area is rustic, which is wonderful, because to do otherwise would just raise questions about how ponies get all of that to work.

Now, our little lost pony (complete with "lost tourist look-around" at the setting) finds her friends, and we learn something else right off the bat.  Some ponies fly, some don't.  Some have horns, some don't.  We have diversity, though we might not know the significance of that yet.  Our next segment also introduces each of our primary characters, as well as their single "defining" characteristic, be it a love of adventure, kindness, or having fun.

But, this doesn't just set up the characters, the fact one pony loves "big adventure" while being shown in a city in the clouds zipping around tells us we can expect other locations as well as, well, adventures.  In particular I like the spotlights on Rainbow Dash and Fluttershy, since one gives us one of the themes of the show, and the other one captures the spirit of the character perfectly, from how she shares with other creatures but is easily startled.  When the pony from the opening shows up again, it really is in a flash of light as the theme tells us that "magic" exists in the world.

Let's summarize everything we've already learned about this show:  It's a world with magic and adventure, taking place in a world without "modern" technologies, and spotlights a group of friends, each of which is different and brings something unique to the group.  And that's ignoring the theme song, which simply finds a way to emphasize these details.

Oh, and the whole thing ends with that dragon we saw at the beginning using his fire breath to send a picture of the friends to what is obviously some kind of royalty.  If anybody who has watched an episode of this wondered why I never brought up Spike's Postal Service Breath before and questioned it, it's because it's explained to us right off the bat.  "This dragon can do this, deal with it."

Really, the only thing I could think would improve the opening would be if they put a rap into the middle of the song giving every character's name along with their description, but they can't all be like the new TMNT theme song.

Now, I'll admit I miss the fact that television shows no longer seem interested in lengthy themes (one reason I watched New Girl for a few episodes was because I was surprised it had an opening theme...the rest of the reasons were all Zooey Deschenel), but I guess with most shows only being 22 minutes long these days for a "half hour" program, space is precious.  But when a show takes the time to actually try to build that hook to pull a viewer in, I appreciate it.

I've watched shows based entirely on being hooked by the opening (it's how Burn Notice grabbed me), and I've avoided shows because the opening completely turned me off.  Had I never heard of this program before, and the MLP theme just happened to come on the TV when I turned it on, I would honestly think "Huh, this looks like it might be a decent show."  And then I might give it a chance to impress me.

Or maybe I just over-think these things.  But either way, good luck getting the Duck Tales theme out of your head!