Welcome to the Comparative Opinions podcast! Hosts Holly and David dive into Black Panther, opening with a spoiler-lite discussion, and then heavily into spoilers. If you haven’t seen the film yet, it’s recommended – even if you haven’t been following the Marvel films, or are feeling superhero fatigue!
Comparative Opinions is a weekly half-hour-ish podcast hosted on ComparativeGeeks.com. Subscribe for new episodes every Sunday, or for our weekly news podcast, Week in Geek.
Welcome to the Comparative Opinions podcast! This week hosts Holly and David made it to Thor: Ragnarok, and the time to talk about it is now! This is the last episode of Comparative Opinions this year, we’ll be back in January! So yeah, spoiler-light and then spoiler-filled discussion of Thor: Ragnarok, which turned out to be a hard movie to talk about without spoilers… short answer: go see it!
Comparative Opinions is a weekly half-hour-ish podcast hosted on ComparativeGeeks.com. Subscribe for new episodes every Sunday!
We saw the Lego Batman Movie a couple weeks ago, and I’m not quite sure what to say about it. It was good. We enjoyed it.
It ends up as a pretty good answer to the question of “what is it like in the realm of one of the master builders?” Because that’s how you make a stand-alone movie that’s also a sequel to the Lego Movie. Batman makes for a good hero, since he was a hilarious secondary character in the original.
It also ends up a pretty good movie for exploring the question of, “who is Batman? And who is Batman in relation to others?” What Batman needs is a family. What he has no idea how to deal with is a family. This movie explores that pretty well, with the young ward, with Batgirl and the relationship with the police, and even exploring the relationship with Alfred.
All-in-all, it seems like not much to say. If you’re a Batman fan, check out the movie. If you’re a Lego Movie fan, check out the movie. But all of that also seems pretty obvious. It was good. It didn’t blow me away like the Lego Movie did, but that was probably impossible.
And then, the review circuit gave me something to talk about.
Gay Adoption Undercurrents? Really?
There’s a review that said that a simple running joke in the movie was in fact an insidious hidden political agenda. The joke is simple: when Batman is confronted by Robin about how his adopted father, Bruce Wayne, should be consulted before he runs off to be a superhero… Batman lies. Rather than reveal his secret identity, he claims that he adopted Robin along with Bruce Wayne.
It is mentioned a few times, so it becomes a running joke. There’s not really any discussion of what relationship Bruce Wayne and Batman have – just that Robin has two fathers.
In my opinion, the joke is that Batman tells an obvious lie and Robin buys it hook, line, and sinker. The joke is that he doesn’t get it. And the joke relies on the audience knowing full well what the truth is – so the audience knows, completely, that it’s not true. So any young people who might get brainwashed by any subliminal messaging there… they know it’s a lie.
But still, there’s that thought that – because no one corrects Robin of his belief in his two fathers – it’s normalizing the idea of having two fathers. But the joke relies on the absurdity of that claim – so does it actually normalize anything?
Or is it just a joke playing on the blind trust of Robin, the naivety, and the cold Batman who won’t let anyone in?
I’d love to know what you think, about this or about the movie in general!
Another year of media consumed and in a year of generally terrible things it is nice to look at what was good during this year. This year was difficult because with GeekBaby it can be difficult to find the time and we are slowly figuring it out. The lack of time that we have does mean that we are more particular about what we consume, which can make it hard to decide what was the best for this year. Now the other issue is the fact that for these it is not about whether it was released this year, but whether we consumed it this year. So without further adieu here are my best of 2016
This weekend David and I went and saw Divergent in theaters. The quick take on the movie is that it was an enjoyable ride. It was not the best movie that I have been through, but it kept me entertained for two and a half hours. Now I admit that I am a bit biased because I read all three books in a week. I really enjoyed the book series and in some ways I will admit it tainted my view of the movie because I knew what was going to happen beyond the first movie. Knowing where it all goes definitely made it a different experience for me. At the same time I thought the movie did a good job of capturing the story and general feeling of the first book.
There were certain scenes that they changed to up the action, but overall I thought they kept pretty faithful to the book. The two places that I found the most changes were in the mental spaces and some of the violence. (Spoilers for Divergent after the jump.)
Comparative Geeks 