Didn’t that phrase die out about 3 years ago?

Yes, that would be me.

But isn’t brevity supposed to be the soul of wit?

You know what part I liked best about Wall-E? It’s the part when the new Peter Gabriel song kicks in!

Isn’t that somewhere in the end credits?

~

Coat

I don’t think those superheroine movies were bad because they’re female or the characters suck, I just think the filmmakers involved didn’t know how to make a good film out of them.

As for WALL-E, The Beat has become quite smug and fascist in its recommendation of stuff it favors in recent years. WALL-E is a good example of that “with us or against us” attitude. Personally, there are about 50 films I want to see before I even consider watching WALL-E (hopefully for free on TV over some future Thanksgiving holiday…yes, I can wait that long for it).

WHITE ELEPHANT IN THE ROOM: And everyone knows but will not admit that the design of WALL_E looks like a rejected concept sketch from THE BLACK HOLE. There, I’ve said it!

I have to call BS on that … casual fans, sitting around chatting about which characters they’d like to see on the screen, shouldn’t be required to produce graphs, statistics and pie-charts. And She-Hulk would rock as a film …

I have an idea … let’s make movies of Supergirl, Elektra and Catwoman … only this time, make them GOOD.

“Serial storytelling isn’t the natural order of things. Close-ended storytelling is. The characters are linked to the plot, setting, and theme, the characters fulfill their purpose within the story being told — and that’s it. The writer goes on and writes another story, with different characters appropriate for the plot, setting, and theme.”

Nonsense. The oldest extant forms of storytelling we have are extremely fragmentary tales of popular myth-figures like Baal and Enki; tales which could only be understood if the audience possessed prior knowledge of their history in other tales. The famous Gilgamesh Epic is a comparatively-late development which does have a beginning, middle and end, but one may surmise that it’s a work done for an educated class and as such is an exception to the general rule.

“If readers/viewers “get into” characters too much, they’ll tolerate stories that range from mediocre to garbage simply for the pleasure of seeing their favorites doing things. They’ll hope that better stories come along, they’ll tolerate obvious repetition in plots and/or character bits and/or themes and rationalize that a string of bad stories are aberrations; they might be strung along for years.’

That’s true so far as it goes, but you overlook the fact that occasionally you do get a Steve Englehart who can spin other authors’ straw into gold. That’s the name of the continuity game, and if it’s not worth the candle to you, then don’t play. But there’s no reason to think that what you conceive to be “better works” will please everyone else.

That’s your opinion, and that’s fine, but I don’t see what about Wonder Woman, Catwoman or She-Hulk’s stories, when taking in the entire continuity of each…is so subpar to Batman or Iron Man or Hulk or Superman. Or why, as a concept, they are less sound with which to base a successful property. All have been handled poorly at one point or other, all have been handled excellently at another. You might not think so, but that’s your opinion. And one doesn’t have to rely on what’s been in the comics to tell a good story, but it helps to start there.

Also, it’s insulting to insinuate that the reason we’re discussing this is because we can’t tell the difference between fantasy and reality. I don’t think any of these characters are real. That’s ridiculous. Only a crazy person would think that. Different stories resonate differently for different people. We could talk about what makes a “good” story, in terms of structure, maybe…but beyond that you’re using your personal distaste for these stories as a blanket judgment of the characters worth as a story. And I’m really not sure what it’s based on.

I don’t need to prove to you why Wonder Woman or any of the others are “worth” telling stories about, anymore than I need to prove why Batman or Superman are. The very fact that you’re demanding we do so speaks volumes about where you’re coming from on this subject.

So…we have to all be story editors with story opinions that match yours in order to argue that a character has not been handled well, and could be handled better? Wow. What is there to say to that? You’re clearly not interested in a discussion.

I also disagree that a characters worth is based solely on the quality of the story they’re in. In a finite story that might be true, but it isn’t in continuing storylines. Applying that to comics is dismissing the form and seems pointless to me to even discuss. You’re arguing that comics shouldn’t be comics. Large continuities are part of the medium, like it or not.

But again, I don’t see how Wonder Woman, She-Hulk, or the X women are “junk”…and I notice you didn’t include the men. If that’s true, shouldn’t Batman and Superman and Wolverine and Professor X also be junk? What is it about the female characters that bothers you so much? Their concepts are no different than their male counterparts. Why are the women singled out as “junk”? And why must we provide a “good” story for you? Who put you in the position to demand anything from the discussion?

Anyone who demands that others follow arbitrary and ill-defined story rules of their own making in order to have an informed opinion isn’t really going to listen to anything anyone else has to say. It’s combative and counter productive as an approach as well.

I would have to imagine that there are a lot of properties that you could suggest *would* make money and almost none you can reverse engineer into a sure thing by using type-shouty logic on a message board. What a bizarre standard.

Also, I think people forget that there’s already been a successful Wonder Woman movie — the best superhero movie of all time.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pXfNg6NN3C4

If readers/viewers “get into” characters too much, they’ll tolerate stories that range from mediocre to garbage simply for the pleasure of seeing their favorites doing things. They’ll hope that better stories come along, they’ll tolerate obvious repetition in plots and/or character bits and/or themes and rationalize that a string of bad stories are aberrations; they might be strung along for years.

IMO, anyone who’s going to argue for seeing a particular character on the big screen should be able to identify the character’s natural theme(s) and generate a plot for a story that would treat the character well. If he doesn’t know the character well enough to know his/her history, lacks the writing/editorial ability to generate story ideas, or is just too passive to make the effort, he’s not positioned well to argue anything. He’s much more likely to wait and wait until (if) something does come out, and then complain because the treatment didn’t satisfy his fantasies of what the character should do, even if those fantasies don’t lend themselves to stories.

When I look at She-Hulk and Wonder Woman as character concepts, I see junk. When I look at the X-women, I see characters with limited powers and limited roles in ensembles. I don’t see characters that would be worth betting millions of dollars on as box office draws.

I don’t expect anyone to spend a lot of time trying to convince me that (fill in the blank) is a potential star, but — if you had the chance to tell one story about any hero or heroine, at any point in his or her continuity, what would that story be?

SRS

It’s not any more ridiculous to have a postscript with a successfully run restaurant with a rat chef as it is to have a rat chef to begin with. Or a talking rat. Or one that wants to cook and steers a human by a code of hair pulling. It doesn’t actually violate the rules because the first restaurant was closed because the health inspector found discovered the rat “infestation”. That’s clearly not common knowledge at the second place or no one but the food critic would eat there. It might be slightly bending the rules, but it’s not violating them. It’s just assuming the audience will follow the string of logic.

As for Wall-E…uhm, those are sort of personal peeves that aren’t the films responsibility to address. They could have garbage for any number of reasons, it’s not a narrative or plot hole. I get your issue with the air, but the reality is we only see one part of the planet, which is clearly a wasteland. But we don’t know if thats literally everywhere. The land clearly isn’t arable, but there may be enough oxygen for some kind of life…afterall, there is the cockroach. So it’s a bending of the rules of the world, not breaking.

As a public service, perhaps you could tell us which posts are coming from one person. Sockpuppetry needs to see the light of day!

I have 2 ISPs, but, fortunately, there is only one me.

One further adjunct, and perhaps we’ll let this be.

Wasn’t it Ralph Waldo Emerson who said “Foolish consistency is….”

I’m sure you know the rest.

It also drives me nuts that Ratatouille ends with a postscript in which Remy the Rat is running a successful Parisian restaurant with all his rat friends. Why? Because five minutes earlier, the health department had shut down Gusteau’s for this very same reason.

And here’s the thing for both movies: If you’re going to create a fictional world, you can’t violate the rules you create for it.

I mean no disrespect, and please don’t take this personally–you ARE crazy.

I betcha if you trace the IPs of all those anti-Pixar posts, you’ll find Jeffrey Katzenberg’s computer.

(About to say something…)

(Stops.)

(Shakes head and walks away.)

Although I enjoyed most of the movie and loved the characters, I was pulled out of the movie and really disappointed by two things:

First, there’s a scene aboard humanity’s space ship in which our heroes land in a gigantic garbage pit. Hundreds of years in space, and humanity hasn’t learned to recycle? Some environmental message.

Secondly, the movie ends after the humans return to earth. When they disembark, although the planet is still putrid, NO ONE IS WEARING ANY BREATHING APPARATUS. There is no way that, after centuries of there being no plant life on Earth other than one recently discovered seedling, enough oxygen has been produced to make that possible.

People think I’m crazy when I bring these points up, but for me it keeps Wall-E from the upper echelon of Pixar Movies (Toy Story 1-2 being my faves).

While they aren’t musicals, isn’t there plenty of singing in the Toy Story movies? Haven’t theis songs been nominated for Oscars?

I inferred the same Heidi.

Talk about moving the goalposts!