Wonder Woman / Wonder Woman 1984 (Patty Jenkins, 2017/20)

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barryconvex
billy..biff..scooter....tommy
Joined: Fri Aug 24, 2012 10:08 pm
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Re: Wonder Woman / Wonder Woman 1984 (Patty Jenkins, 2017/20)

#176 Post by barryconvex » Sun Jan 17, 2021 5:27 am

I don't know if it's been said yet but welcome to the forum and great ID/moniker bottles. You can't go wrong with a Pogues reference in any area of day to day online life.

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bottlesofsmoke
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Re: Wonder Woman / Wonder Woman 1984 (Patty Jenkins, 2017/20)

#177 Post by bottlesofsmoke » Sun Jan 17, 2021 11:58 am

barryconvex wrote:
Sun Jan 17, 2021 5:27 am
I don't know if it's been said yet but welcome to the forum and great ID/moniker bottles. You can't go wrong with a Pogues reference in any area of day to day online life.
Thanks! I’ve found it to be a great moniker because if you don’t know the song, (which most people in my age group sadly don’t) it could mean anything, so when asked, I can give some elaborately pretentious explanation of it as some deep metaphor. It’s kept me entertained, at least. And it’s a great song too!

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barryconvex
billy..biff..scooter....tommy
Joined: Fri Aug 24, 2012 10:08 pm
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Re: Wonder Woman / Wonder Woman 1984 (Patty Jenkins, 2017/20)

#178 Post by barryconvex » Tue Jan 19, 2021 4:34 am

I swore when I first heard that song that I would someday own an all black racehorse like the one in The Black Stallion and name him after that song.

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swo17
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Wonder Woman 1984

#179 Post by swo17 » Wed Apr 07, 2021 6:19 am

It's entirely possible that my enjoyment of superhero movies is just always inversely proportional to their popularity, but I liked this more than expected and here's why: First, this is a pretty corny movie, but it's corny in the same way the Christopher Reeve Superman movies were, which I count as a plus. Second, while it's a surprise that I was able to physically see any of the film, my eyes having permanently lodged in the back of my head upon first learning that Chris Pine was reprising his character from the first entry, I actually really appreciated how they handled this:
SpoilerShow
Instead of some lame convoluted sci-fi excuse, they went with a fantasy approach--the mere granting of a wish--and more importantly, there were high stakes associated with it--the creation of two villains by the same power, and the eventual reveal that the wish gradually weakened the recipient and would have to be renounced. This, and the sort of jarring slower pace during which the characters are learning all of this information, was easily the most satisfying element of the film, and made it instantly more vital for me than the first one, about which I remember nothing other than the fact that Chris Pine died and should therefore no longer appear in movies, either Wonder Woman-related or otherwise

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knives
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Re: Wonder Woman / Wonder Woman 1984 (Patty Jenkins, 2017/20)

#180 Post by knives » Sun Jul 04, 2021 5:02 pm

Paint me with the Swo brush because despite not liking this film I found a lot to admire and have had it trapped in my mind. The movie is overly long, is poorly edited in the action scenes, and absolutely fails to connect its narrative and thematic strands together despite stealing wholesale from Batman Returns for most of it (just imagine that film with Jung and Expressionism replaced by Monkey’s Paw and bootstraps-ism).

Still, I can’t help but help that this replaces action scenes with interpersonal relationships (seriously one of the big action scenes is WW stopping a small mall burglary with over an hour between action scenes). A film that at least tries to show a mature sexual relationship based in love and respect. A film with whatever Pedro Pascal is doing here (I don’t think he was intended as a Trump figure as posited above and if he was then that is an awfully positive portrayal given his motivation is basically to be a father worth being respected). A film that just feels so different.

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tenia
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Re: Wonder Woman / Wonder Woman 1984 (Patty Jenkins, 2017/20)

#181 Post by tenia » Mon Jul 05, 2021 4:54 am

That's probably one of my issues with the movie : it feels extremely overlong because not only does it offer little action (and the little it offers isn't very good - the finale in particular) but it obviously tries to trade action for relationships and emotion and psychology and I felt it also fails to offer something substantial there. It didn't feel much deeper than the shallowness of the first movie, and it didn't help that it felt like an obvious rehash (but in a lesser form) of better movies.
Diana's love/sex life also didn't feel that mature not treated in an uniquely better-than-usual way because the whole plot about it felt silly to begin with but was also treated, in the end, in a quite predictable manner (like straight from the 70s predictable). Most of the movie feels like it's on auto-pilot in this aspect, so these sections felt like tunnels of boredom and with little action in between, I'm not surprised this ended up getting mixed reviews overall. But I still feel it actually isn't that different from the 1st movie, only slightly worse : I found WW quite mediocre and often laughably written (I scored it around 5 out 10), this one is just a bit worse in most aspects (pace, direction, visuals, story) : 3 out of 10.

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therewillbeblus
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Re: Wonder Woman / Wonder Woman 1984 (Patty Jenkins, 2017/20)

#182 Post by therewillbeblus » Wed Jul 14, 2021 10:03 pm

I didn’t like this either, but agree with swo’s reading and knives’ unfavorable Batman Returns comparison is spot on. I appreciated how the high stakes concept, and reciprocal loss attached to this addictive shortcut to realising fantasies, unlocked the core of American culture’s individualistic drives altered in the Reagan era. Specifically, the film took a novel approach by meditating on the empathy for this easy-path wish-fulfillment (literally) as born not from learned or inherent laziness or egotism, but because we are so desperate to achieve what we lack- a desperation sourced in the immense pain from that deficit as a spiritual hole unsupported by the social context.

Whether this stems from social comparison or despair at navigating an impossible systemic structure or personal trauma history, the goals of the characters- good and bad, in action- aren’t ‘for’ gratification but rather ‘against’ unbearable dysphoria. It’s a bit like addiction’s self-medication hypothesis of avoiding egregious internal states vs the false belief that people just wanted to party hard and have fun. In this way the film operates counter to the moral model of behavior we often see in these kinds of movies, even the ones that want to grant complexity to villains.
SpoilerShow
Wiig and Pascal don’t cling to their wishes due to insanity, stupidity, or moral failing, but because they cannot imagine returning to the alienation of being disempowered. When Wiig dies instead of giving up her power we don’t view her as weaker than Wonder Woman under equitable conditions either. Wonder Woman is only able to make the clear cut sacrifice because a) she learned the ‘no cheating’/shortcuts lesson from her mother as a child and thus had an opportunity to develop this ethos not afforded to Wiig and Pascal growing up under this capitalist milieu that reinforces the opposite worldview and behavior patterns, b) she is an alien to this land, and as a result has more elasticity to break from a culture she is not bound to by place or time, c) speaking of time, hasn’t she had plenty of time to evolve her maturity, cope with stressors, and view this as only a slice of her existence rather than the high stakes philosophical dilemmas Wiig and Pascal do under normal term limits of lifespan?
I think the film takes a pretty clear stand against WW as innately superior and only better because of her supernatural advantages (playing into the themes of the bootstraps-logic), by stalling on the handicaps of being human, which when exposed make this a pretty enlightening existential narrative. It’s like viewing our own fatalistic faults through the eyes of an alien who doesn’t speak the language of our constraints, as opposed to all the superheroes who are humanized as the central perspective of their films. WW is humanized but the intention is not to achieve commonality and focus on her in a typical humanist melting pot superhero fashion, but to use her foreignness as a variable prism deflecting light to focus on ourselves through an altered state, as outcasts and inherently oppressed by our own institutions rather than dominant and blind to these collective problems we must each face alone.

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