Shut up nerds. I am talking.
In my day job, I am a film critic. Or, as I like to explain whenever a cute girl asks me what I do for a living, I am a writer who writes about movies, because they’re the only ones paying me to write anything at all. Only they don’t really pay me. Can we please go back to talking about your cats now?
Yeah, I’m working on getting that down to a more manageable soundbite. But in the meantime, I’d like to take a moment to share some thoughts on a movie announcement, which again, as a film critic, I would usually do for the website I write for. But I’m kind of vacation from all that right now, so I’m putting it here. Adjust your perceptions accordingly.
They have announced the cast for the upcoming ‘Suicide Squad’ movie, and it is, in a word, completely batshit insane.
And in a weird way, it makes me more excited for the DC movies than the upcoming Marvel slate.
Don’t get me wrong, I have no illusion that the DC movies will be good. I admire Warner Bros fly by the seat of their pants approach to billion dollar filmmaking, but it’s probably not the stuff that instant classics are made of. More to the point, though: they’re an unknown quantity. I pretty much already know what I’m going to get when I watch a Marvel movie: it’ll be one of the most entertaining films I see that year, and I will remember it fondly, if rarely be compelled to seek it out ever again (I will, more likely than not, watch parts of it when it’s on cable, though).
Really, Marvel has the shit down to a science at this point. They’ve become so good at maintaining and expanding their franchises that we’re starting to anticipate the first failure, the same way we did when Pixar was on their grind and we all secretly breathed a sigh of relief when ‘Cars 2’ came out. And speaking of which, what the fuck was THAT about? Is that where we are in our pop culture now, where we’re actively rooting against really good movies? Because if so, that is NOT a good color on us as a society.
But I digress. DC is applying for serious Wild Card status here: Announcing an insane three year release slate, putting Zack Synder in charge of things, throwing out a bunch of relatively untested actors into their Justice League, front loading their other property with some massive names (and also Jai Courtney).
Frankly, I have no idea what they’re thinking. And I love it.
So let this be a lesson to all of you out there: if you’re going to fight the big boys, there’s really only one way to go about it: just get super weird and crazy with it, dude.
You may fail, but at least you left an entire nation of nerds asking “What the fuck?”, and this should be reward enough.
Although I guess if you’d prefer to make a billion dollars instead, I can see where maybe that wouldn’t be reward enough, so… fair enough.
Pryorball. 