Week in Geek S.2 E.2

Week in Geek, season 2 episode 2, recorded 2/26/18. News since last episode, including: Kevin Smith heart attack; small news for The Name of the Wind and Sherlock season 5; Black Panther and its success and detractors; Joss Whedon steps down from Batgirl and other DCEU talk; Disney streaming service talk; Sony and their movie studio; Brendan Fraser’s #MeToo; and Dumbledore’s sexuality. This episode includes a stinger…

Here’s a link to the Brendan Fraser article: https://www.gq.com/story/what-ever-happened-to-brendan-fraser

Our other podcast is Comparative Opinions, find it and old Week in Geek episodes on ComparativeGeeks.com. Subscribe for new episodes!

Music is by Scott Gratton: http://freemusicarchive.org/music/Scott_Gratton/Intros_and_Outros

Advertisement

Week in Geek Episode 9

Week in Geek, episode 9, recorded 10/18/17. News since last recording, including: Hollywood is full of stories in the wake of Harvey Weinstein, how long will it last?; a Settlers of Catan movie, apparently; a Hulk 3-movie story arc; looking ahead at Marvel Phase 4; Joss Whedon and director credit for Justice League; Solo: A Star Wars Story; and NetFlix pushing unique content in a big way.

And here’s a link to that great Black Panther trailer: https://youtu.be/oHLU3T-e2t4

Our other podcast is Comparative Opinions, find it and old Week in Geek episodes on ComparativeGeeks.com. Subscribe for new episodes!

Music is by Scott Gratton: http://freemusicarchive.org/music/Scott_Gratton/Intros_and_Outros

What’s Up, Han Solo Film?

Oh yeah, amidst everything else going on in Hollywood, they’re working on a Han Solo prequel standalone anthology film. Kind of forgot about that – certainly didn’t realize they had started filming in January, nor that it was slated for May 2018 (rather than as another Christmas-time film). However, there’s a slight hitch in that today, as apparently the directors have left the film over “creative differences.”

Damn, Han Solo pic.twitter.com/RqFdgakNJ9

— Ash Crossan (@AshCrossan) June 20, 2017

Thanks for the news, Twitter Moments.

Some people were super disappointed because they apparently knew the additional fact that the two directors – Phil Lord and Christopher Miller – had worked on such films as The Lego Movie and Cloudy with a Chance of Meatballs. Okay, I liked those, sure, sad to have them go. And moreso, bad to have them go mid-filming. That Disney expects to keep the movie on-target is impressive.

---

I mean, movies lose directors, have creative differences, and in other ways slide into production hell all the time – it’s the plans to power through on this movie that is impressive, and also worrisome. This seems like a hard movie to do well, and having a single vision for it would of course be better than multiple visions – although with “creative differences,” it may already be too late for that.

This isn’t the first franchise to recently lose the director in the late days of filming. Justice League saw Zack Snyder bow out, for totally understandable personal reasons. The studio quickly got Joss Whedon, of all people, lined up to finish the movie, with re-shoots and editing to go – again, keeping the original release date in November this year.

There are reports that Joss is expected to do more re-shoots than Zack Snyder was planning to, and in the end we’ll likely be seeing a movie that has a touch of both of them clearly apparent. Hopefully in a good way; time will tell.

I could see something similar ending up happening with the Han Solo film: a high profile director coming in and acting as the closer on the film, who also maybe does a bit of work to make the film a bit more “their own.” One of the Twitter suggestions was Edgar Wright, and while I would love that, I don’t know how much he would want to tackle someone else’s movie (after all the trouble he went through trying to make Ant Man).

Time will tell – possibly quite soon – for the Han Solo film.

Genre and Medium and the “Popcorn Movie” and Age of Ultron

So, back when Avengers: Age of Ultron first came out, I read the following review on Wired:

• Age of Ultron is Proof Marvel is Killing the Popcorn Movie: http://www.wired.com/2015/05/marvel-killing-the-popcorn-movie/

I felt that I wanted to see the movie more than once to really know what I thought of it. Because of the Geek Baby, that second viewing only happened recently. I’ve been mulling over the movie, with posts like this one and like this one.

To sum up reviews of the movie, I think that it was alright but nowhere near as good as the first Avengers. It’s not doing something new and different like the first one did (bringing together how many individual movie franchises), it’s not as excellent a dark trilogy sequel as some of the classics (Empire Strikes Back), and it has Too Much Going On And Being Set Up syndrome (but not as badly as, say, Amazing Spider-Man 2). Do these statements seem fair?

I talked about the first couple of things in my prior posts, so let me just say something here about Too Much Going On And Being Set Up. Some of the most hotly debated scenes from the movie – Thor’s vision quest, the Banner/Natasha “monster” discussion – had extended, deleted scenes. That was really interesting to find on the disc. These scenes that the fans saw as particularly troubling were ones that, apparently, Joss Whedon had trouble with too.

Was it because he was trying to succumb to the all-powerful Marvel plan? Yeah, maybe some. But the two versions of scenes like this show me that Joss did his best to work them into the movie in its final form. Successfully? Eh. Clearly debatable. But the theatrical versions were the ones that he meant for us to see… the scenes of lesser evil?

However, my main purpose here is the review from Wired. It says it was picked up from another site, so it was opinionated enough for syndication. It got me fired up before, but rather than a point-by-point rebuttal or some other Nerd Rage, I want to just address the main point of the article.

This. Re: Age of Ultron

A couple of weeks ago I talked about how the YouTube review shows were starting to hit Avengers: Age of Ultron. Well, we watched the one from Honest Trailers and… yep. That kind of sums it up.

What do you think? Too harsh? Or was it inevitably an impossible movie to make everyone happy and do everything? And did they break Joss Whedon? Let me know what you think in the comments below!