Hey look! They’re having an argument…and they’re in a dark alley…and they get mugged! That’s a surprise. It’s almost as if they’ve left Marston’s original script behind, and all of a sudden they can’t think of anything but cliches. Almost.

Wonder Woman beats the crap out of the muggers and Steve simpers “That was kind of hot.” And fetishizing tough women is certainly a thing in contemporary movies. Having it underlined over and over by a frat boy, though, doesn’t really add to the glamor. Why isn’t she kicking the shit out of him, too, when he says stuff like that? I guess the filmmakers just can’t quite believe that masochism is sexier than sexual harrassment….

Fight with Demos is nicely choreographed, though….

“The symbol of tartarus…the greek underworld.” If you actually believed in the religion, you’d just say, “the underworld”.

This “Steve Trevor fighting as an equal stuff…” screw that.

And now he gets to save her from the giant lame bat thing? Did Marston ever let him save her?

50:40 Wow, that’s a grim vision of the underworld; you die and become enslaved to a massively fat decadent Roman despot (I guess he’s supposed to be Greek, actually.)

52:00 Good lord; Steve’s impassioned defense of men makes me want to barf. Sneering at the Amazons for cutting themselves off from man’s world; “Right, because what we need is less communicaton between men and women!” Um, except there are plenty of women on earth, you know, and you tend to interact with them by harassing them systematically , from what we’ve seen.

I bet he hates Bryn Mawr too….

“I’m not going to abandon a friend in need, man or woman.”

And she says, “By the way, you’re starting to sound like a woman.” And it’s a sneer, I think…I’m not sure how else to read it, she’s needling him for revealing his feelings.

Maybe she thought the scene was badly written too, though, to be fair.

54:34 Oh, Christ. Now he’s holding the magic lasso and revealing that he’s a womanizer and a pig because he’s afraid to be hurt. Break out the violins….

Could we please just fuck that shit once and for all? Demeaning women because you feel insecure isn’t cute or sexy or deep. It’s stupid and boring and makes you less, less, less, less appealing, not more. “Oh, deep down, he’s sensitive…it only takes the right woman to bring it out….” Yeah, well…don’t go back to him, Rihanna!

“nobody messes with lincoln!” says Steve. INteresting sentiment for a guy with a southern accent.

I’m just saying is all.

[Update: Really shoudn’t have just said. Not my finest moment. Justly chastised for it here)

Artemis’ giant sword is pretty fun…though, again, it’s hard to argue that she doens’t have some kind of penis envy….

Diana gets saved by her Mom? That’s kind of a let down….

57:42 And the President of the United States is an evil whacko. That seems believable, anyway….

And Wonder woman taunts Ares with not being able to defeat a girl. It’s hard for me to believe an Amazon would ever say that.

Zombie amazons, huh? And the librarian comes back from the dead all butch and tough. It looks like she was really fun to animate; her sort of lurching sword style fighting is maybe my favorite bit of action from the movie; very nicely done.

1:04: “The Amazons are warriors…but we are women too.” So she chose Ares the god of war because she wanted babies and a home? That seems fairly confused. Certainly I see the children bit…but, I mean….Amazons. Surely there are other romantic outlets?

1:07: The threat has been neutralized by “a bunch of armored super-models.”

and then we get her kissing steve. As my ancestores would say, “oy.”

Right at the end we get Steve behaving feminine-like; telling Diana to call if she’s going to be late because he doens’t want dinner to get cold. But it’s definitely played for laughs and seen as unmanning I think…

All right, I’ll have a final post with some last thoughts.

_____________

Update: Update: First thread,second thread, conclusion.

Jesus, he didn’t even get knocked unconsious.

Hey, it’s the bathing beauties splashing each other scene! Isn’t Steve lucky to have stumbled on that!

That is so fucking annoying. This is the absolute first intimation of lesbianism in the film, as far as I can see — have there even been girls hugging? I don’ t think so…and the butch/femme dynamic at the beginning, with Persephone and the librarian, was played completely asexual; Persephone *could* have tried to protect librarian in a romantic-savior kind of way, but instead she sneered at her as weak; no sexual tension allowed….

until the guy shows up, and we can package our lesbianism for his consumption!

Also, in the original Marston story, Steve gets knocked out, and Diana gets to gaze at *him* while he’s unaware/incapacitated. That story is about female desire; you’re identifying with Diana and what she wants. Not here, though.

Good lord, how many kicks to the groin do there need to be in one movie?

Also, Steve shouldn’t last for half a second in a fight with Diana, much less get in a solid blow.

23:05The amazons are horrified that Steve says “crap”. Again with the anal stuff….

Here’s the contest where they figure out who goes to the outside world. No fighting on top of kangaroo horses, though. When did kangaroo horses stop being cool?

25:54 Jesus, they killed the librarian; for a movie that talks about how much men suck, we are not being very kind to the feminine characters.

Yep the explanation of why she is going to wear red white and blue is almost completely nonsensical.

Good lord; the tit shot of her putting on the bustier. Why? (I mean, I guess I know why, but….)

Took almost half the movie to get her into the red and blue….and almost the first thing that happens after she puts it on is that Steve wolf-whistles at her. That’s pretty irritating….

I know folks have complained that the invisible plane comes out of nowhere. I kind of like that, though. Very silver age.

The bit where she teaches the girl to “disembowel her playmates” is also cute, as Steve points out. (The girls friends won’t let her play pirate because she’s a girl….) The girl-power is a bit preachy…but it is Wonder Woman, after all….

Good lord, Etta Candy as femme sexpot flirt is an absolutely hideous decision. I can see why you wouldn’t want the original Etta (fat, butch, talking only about how much she wants to eat); but making her into a kind of seventies feminist feminine nightmare?

I think it’s pretty much official; the movie does not like femininity. To the extent that Wonder Woman is cool, it’s because she’s traditionally masculine (strong, cold-blooded.) Even her reason for leaving the island is pushed masculine — it’s because she’s bored and cooped up, not, as in the original, because she’s got a thing for Steve.

Steve tries to get her drunk…he’s such a prick

All right.. new post.

__________

Update: Update: First thread, third thread, conclusion.

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.

_________________________

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.

Just a reminder, I’m going to be liveblogging the Wonder Woman animated film starting at 7:30 my time, which is 8:30 Eastern time.

Update: Here are my conclusions after watching the movie,. There are also links there to the liveblogging itself….

Wednesday night, I’m going to live-blog the Wonder Woman animated movie, because, eh, why not? Probably start around 7:30. So…rev up your invisible planes! Tighten those Venus gird…um, or, uh, whatever I guess….

Update: That’s 7:30 Chicago time; so 8:30 eastern….