Joss Whedon Round-Up

[ericadawn16]

Why do you think there’s a lack of female superheroes in film?

Joss Whedon: Toymakers will tell you they won’t sell enough, and movie people will point to the two terrible superheroine movies that were made and say, You see? It can’t be done. It’s stupid, and I’m hoping The Hunger Games will lead to a paradigm shift. It’s frustrating to me that I don’t see anybody developing one of these movies. It actually pisses me off. My daughter watched The Avengers and was like, “My favorite characters were the Black Widow and Maria Hill,” and I thought, Yeah, of course they were. I read a beautiful thing Junot Diaz wrote: “If you want to make a human being into a monster, deny them, at the cultural level, any reflection of themselves.”

Can he be in charge of like...everything?

So, I've been worried about being able to see Much Ado about Nothing on the big screen. Muvico sent me an email about making sure I see it in July. JULY!!!!

Bah.

I have since found out that it does open at Tampa Theatre on June 21st which is both awesome and horrible. I love the theatre. It's awesome but...
They don't have weekday matinées and it can be very hard with a retail schedule to get down there on the weekends or at night. We can usually only manage 1-3 films a year.

Damn.

Comments

[celeste9]

<3 him SO MUCH. They need to make a Black Widow movie so bad. A good one.

[ericadawn16.livejournal.com]

And directed by Joss Whedon or Clark Gregg?

[celeste9]

HELL YES!

[ragnarok-08.livejournal.com]

I love him so much :D

[beccadg.livejournal.com]

I'm waiting to see if he includes the Scarlet Witch in the second Avengers movie. I've heard he's going to, but I'm taking an "I'll believe it when I see" on that. I mean I've heard he thought about include the Wasp in the first movie, but then didn't. I'd like to see Storm or Jean Grey get their own X-Men films. Hell, the Phoenix Saga deserves a reboot. I'd cheerfully take a Ms. Marvel movie, or even though I'm primarily a Marvel girl a Wonder Woman movie. I know Joss has tried to get one of those off of the ground in the past.

[http://users.livejournal.com/unnecessary_/]

I read a beautiful thing Junot Diaz wrote: “If you want to make a human being into a monster, deny them, at the cultural level, any reflection of themselves.”

Oh, wow, this quote is intense. I wish you posted this on tumblr so that I could reblog it.

[quadratur.livejournal.com]

There were plans for a Wonder Woman movie. I think I saw costume designs somewhere and they were horrible. But I would love a Wonder Woman movie. never liked the DC verse and the Justice League but I loved Wonder Woman. I even have fond memories of the tv show.

The main reason why the super-heroine movies tanked was because they were simply bad movies. Not because they had females as the main heroes. Hell, make a Hermione Granger-movie and I'm there.

[ericadawn16.livejournal.com]

I know the Tv show costumes were horrible that they were retooled but by then, it was too late and NBC didn't even pick up the pilot. I don't think Whedon's movie got that far...

Let me check.

Here are two pretty good articles about it:
http://www.ew.com/ew/article/0,,20049318,00.html
http://www.ifc.com/fix/2011/11/joss-whedon-wonder-woman

I tried to find stuff before Avengers was released.

Yes, which was the point he was trying to make, that they made bad movies and blamed the lead instead of realizing the script, direction, etc. being the problem.

There are plenty of wonderful heroines to choose from...I know they don't want to release the rights but I still want a Luthien movie. She was first written almost a hundred years ago which makes her one of the original bad-ass females.

[beccadg.livejournal.com]

I'm pretty sure the movie has never gotten beyond scripts, and the god awful Wonder Woman costume designs were for a David E. Kelley TV pilot. It fortunately didn't sell. The only DC series I read religiously was Amethyst, Princess of Gemworld, but I'd still dig a Wonder Woman movie.

Catwoman won Razzies for Direction and Screenplay, but god forbid a Hollywood suit pay any attention to that.

[ericadawn16.livejournal.com]

The only good thing about Catwoman was Klaus Badelt's score.

[beccadg.livejournal.com]

It wasn't just the costuming that sucked for the Wonder Woman pilot. David E. Kelley some how got the idea to make the story more complex than just super heroine with an alter ego. I don't remember exactly how much of mess he made because it gave me a headache. I just know I thought NBC made the right call. Hell, the degree to which that was a train wreck waiting to happen is part of way I didn't get my hopes up about Arrow being good until I actually saw some of the episodes.

As far as I know, while various people have taken a run at making a Wonder Woman script that would sell, no one has gotten beyond writing a script. Certainly Joss didn't.

I understand Joss hoping that The Hunger Games will make for a paradigm shift. I'm afraid of studios seeing it more like Twilight than a comic book movie even though Katniss isn't remotely the doormat that Bella was. I hope that Jennifer Lawrence playing both Katniss and a Young Mystique in the X-Men movies will help people think about her carrying a comic book movie just like she carries The Hunger Games movies.

Luthien? Given your saying she was first written almost a hundred years ago, I'm guessing you aren't talking about Tolkien's. Nothing of his is earlier than The Hobbit in 1937. After seeing how people wrote of Deja Thoris in John Carter without even watching the movie I'd be reluctant to take on a super heroine with a lot of age. They assumed because of her age she was just a somewhat brainy needy princess. Deja Thoris is better with a sword than John Carter is. She carries her own comic book series.

[beccadg.livejournal.com]

I sat through Catwoman for two reasons. One was out of a love of Halle Barry. I'm glad getting caught up in that train wreck didn't keep her from taking on Storm in the X-Men films. The other was because Peter Wingfield had a part in it. I have sat through a variety of awful films for that man. I love him sooo much. <3 <3 <3

[ericadawn16.livejournal.com]

I didn't actually watch the pilot although I know many did...

Yeah, DC was very stupid with Whedon but then, until Avengers, everyone always underestimated Whedon and his fanbase.

Yes, I agree, Hunger Games was only made to get the Twilight fanbase, same as the Cassandra Clare books and that thing with Jeremy Irons that came out a few months ago. Making things worse is that Disney STILL blames the female bent for why Princess and the Frog didn't do as well and they canceled the wonderful Clone Wars series for one that appears to be more male-dominated...

What I see as a more positive sign is that Kick-Ass 2's trailer seems to revolve around the fact that Hit Girl was the break-out star of the first...
But despite Whedon wanting to cast Aaron Taylor-Johnson, I doubt anyone's going to realize that lesson either...

And dammit, Kathleen Kennedy is a woman herself, why do women let these things happen?

I am not very familiar with John Carter and the Princess of Mars sadly...

However, Beren and Luthien were some of the first writings Tolkien did back in 1918 or so. The Hobbit was the first thing published but his writings on The Silmarillion were first. It's just that he kept adding and adding and rewriting and rewriting and tweaking it until he died.

She's my favorite Tolkien heroine so I have a tendency to bring her up at every turn.

[beccadg.livejournal.com]

You're better off having not seen the pilot.

I don't think it was up to DC whether or not Joss got to do the movie. They haven't taken control of their brand the way Marvel has. To be fair I can't remember if Marvel got their movie studios set up before they got bought by Disney or not. Still, with DC it was more of a studio decision than a publishing house one.

I haven't seen The Princess and the Frog, but only partly out of frustration that the story is actually The Frog Prince. It's more out of it seeming like the leads, both genders, spend a lot of the movie as frogs. That's not a "girl" movie at that point. It's a "cute animals" movie. *Rolls eyes.*

I haven't seen Kick-Ass, but it's certainly a good thing if someone picked up on the female character being a break-out.

Beats me why women let these things happen. I mean Jane Goldman worked on the script for X-Men:First Class, and it's ability to pass the Bechdel test is debatable.

The first book in the Barsoom series is actually titled A Princess of Mars. There's no John Carter in the title. Not that Disney, when it didn't even have the guts to have Mars in the title, was ever gonna bill the princess like that. That first book was published in 1917, but the story had been published in serial form first. The story was actually first published in 1912. Deja Thoris was 100 years old last year. ;)

Ah. I like the Hobbit all right, but I've never managed to get into the rest of Tolkien's work. I liked how Peter Jackson let Arwen be a bit more kick ass in the movies than Tolkien wrote her, and I'm looking forward to seeing what his female sylvan elf in The Hobbit films will be like. She looks kick ass from the material that's been released so far.

[ericadawn16.livejournal.com]

Oh...

See, Tauriel is a new Elf they invented for The Hobbit since the original book is lacking in females...Tolkien always meant to go back and fix it to make it more like LOTR but he couldn't do that AND perfect The Silmarillion more so he chose The Silmarillion.

I will forever be glad of this though because The Silmarillion has tons of awesome females; saving their kin, saving their husbands, saving themselves, saving their world, fighting Sauron and Morgoth, turning into animals, standing up to their husbands... Elves, Goddesses and Humans alike. The Silmarillion even hints of a female love interest for Gandalf.

However, if they do make Tauriel Legolas' love interest as everyone keeps predicting, I'm going to ignore that because the books make Legolas/Gimli pretty clear.

I do hope that she is kick ass though and I am sad at the backlash against her even though I understand their reasons. It's a little weird because in LOTR, Arwen was simply given what was either implied in Tolkien's appendices and other writingss or what was done by others while Tauriel is completely new. While I support adding more females, I hope it doesn't backfire more because as it is, I didn't really like most of the extra stuff they added to the first film and a lot of other people complained, too.

[beccadg.livejournal.com]

...Tauriel is a new Elf they invented for The Hobbit...

I know that. I've read The Hobbit repeatedly, and I watched the Rankin/Bass animated version of the story as a kid. I'm interested in her because, after having seen how Peter handled Arwen, Galadriel, and Eowyn, I want to see what a female character he has made up is like.

Tolkien always meant to go back and fix it to make it more like LOTR...

I've never heard that, but given that I've never been able to finish LotR it's probably just as well he didn't.

...he couldn't do that AND perfect The Silmarillion more so he chose The Silmarillion.

J.R.R. Tolkien never finished The Silmarillion. Christopher Tolkien and Guy Gavriel Kay gathered all the work he'd put into it together into a book after his death.

...The Silmarillion has tons of awesome females...

I wouldn't know. I've never read The Silmarillion for a number of reasons. There's my inability to finish the LotR, knowing The Silmarillion wasn't finished by J.R.R. Tolkien, and that it is a collection of stuff that's back story to the LotR, and that's just what I can think of right now. There are probably others I'm forgetting.

...if they do make Tauriel Legolas' love interest as everyone keeps predicting, I'm going to ignore that because the books make Legolas/Gimli pretty clear.

Legolas/Gimli, hu? I've only ever been on the fringe of the fandom, but it seemed like the most popular pairing was Legolas/Aragorn. Not that giving Legolas a female love interest wouldn't upset those shippers. As much as I liked the little changes Peter made to Arwen's role, I couldn't blame people for choosing to ship him with Legolas over her. I'm not terribly fond of J.R.R. Tolkien's treatment of women. A lot of it feels like they're more abstract ideals to be worshipped then like they're real people. It's why I've always liked Eowyn best. She seems the most real of the bunch in LotR.

I do hope that she is kick ass though and I am sad at the backlash against her even though I understand their reasons.

I'm not surprised to hear there is a backlash. I know there were some people who were angry just from the little changes Peter made to Arwen's role.

While I support adding more females, I hope it doesn't backfire more because as it is, I didn't really like most of the extra stuff they added to the first film and a lot of other people complained, too.

I think it'll likely be something of a trade off. There will be Tolkien purests who'll get bent all out of shape about her, but there will be people who either like me simply aren't invested in textual purity, or who don't even know the text to begin to have an opinion on the textual purity. I already bought me a Tauriel action figure because she looks just the way I imagined some of the elven characters I played in D&D looking.