We’re getting set to start the liveblogging of the Wonder Woman animated movie here. This is a new experience for me, so I expect there to be some technical difficulties (read: human error.) We’ll do our best though. If I seem to be taking too long between posts, you can always go skim through my ridiculously overextended analysis of Wonder Woman in comics. Or you can read Chris Mautner’s thoroughly entertaing review of the DVD I’m about to liveblog.

Incidentally, since I’ve read Chris’s review, I’m sort of expecting this to be not that great. And, as I said, I haven’t done liveblogging, so I’m not sure how this is going to work. So if you want dispassionate professional competence, you probably need to go find a newspaper…oh, right. Forgot; they’re all out of business.

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And here we go….

There’s the title; PG 13 just like I was promised.

Pretty nifty animation, visually; I feel a little like I’ve been dumped into the Lord of the rings though

Ooooh; scary minotaur men

Guess that’s hippolyta…hey they just killed a horse….no wait, it’s getting uphave been in trouble with the animated SPCA

1:42: okay, I think maybe the way to do this is to watch in ten minute bursts and then blog; otherwise I’m going to completely lose the thread, such as it is. So I’ll be back in ten.

2:45 So not quite ten minutes, really. Incidentally, the time is the distance into the film, not the actual time. I’m not in Australia. (or Wherever)

So Hippolyta is pretty tough; the opening sequence where she fights off twelve guys, gets picked up and then dropped by some flying monster thing, catches it with her lasso, decapitates it with her tiara (you’ve gotta love Marston; nobody uses the whole tiara as weapon thing anymore…where was I? oh yeah) while she’s in the air, no less, and then times it so she lands perfectly in front of Ares is pretty bad ass. But then Ares kind of has to ruin it all by suggesting that she used to want to sleep with him. What is that anyway? That’s not cannon…in the first WW story, Hippolyta and Hercules had a thing, which makes a lot more sense since, you know…Ares is the God of War. Don’t fuck with the God of War. As it were.

Also, Ares seems to be suggesting that witnessing bloodshed improves his sexual performance. I guess that makes sense if you’re the god of war….but is it really something you’d want to admit to your ex-flame?

7:14: the psychic energies of war? Good lord, who comes up with this stuff?

I’ve got to say, the Amazons are a pretty bloodthirsty lot too. It’s not so much Hippolyta decapitating her own son (I know, I know…a woman’s choice and all that), but the mean-spirited sneering mockery of the girl who’s not that into the fighting is very much male-coded behavior. We’re pretty far from Marston’s belief in Platonic gender difference, obviously….

10:40: Diana beats Artemis and sneers at her; a snotty Diana is kind of entertaining I guess… It’s not entirely divorced form the source material, anyway; Marston’s WW was kind of a snot too….

So Hippolyta hates all men, and then we’re introduced to Steve Rogers, flying overhead on a completely unexplained mission, involving some random country that apparently is willing to start an international incident by shooting down American pilots.

I like that the first thing we see Steve do is sexually harrass his subordinate (he starts talking about sphincters and then suggests he can help her out with it. Because, hey, anal references and sexual harassment are funny. If you’re a thirteen to thirty year old boy. Which is the audience for Wonder Woman these days, apparently. Who knew?

I couldn’t care less about this fucking fighter pilot crap. I know Steve Trevor isn’t going to get killed no matter how much I want him to, so what’s the fucking point.

I’m going to start a new thread, by the by….

Update: Second thread, third thread, conclusion.