"The Best Movie of 2020"...?

Birds of Prey (And The Emancipation of One Harley Quinn)...was in theaters for a month & a half. It had an R-rating, which kept kids from seeing it, unless accompanied by their parents; it had a limited budget, which meant the nature of the plot would be kept on a street-level, with little room for spectacle; the budget kept the wardrobe from access to creating elaborate superhero costumes; and it had a terrible trailer, fronting toxic misandry disguised as "woke" feminism. For a movie based on DC Comics characters, it performed below expectations, but two curious things happened this week that got people talking about it again. First, this Gamespot article:

    I usually confuse them with                             Game Stop.

Second, it has a better score on Rotten Tomatoes than Wonder Woman 1984:

I usually don't set up my conclusion this far after the intro, but the point I'm going to make is that I enjoyed Birds of Prey, but...to say it's the "Best Movie of The Year" has me wondering if there were any movies we missed before handing this movie that distinction, or, given everything that's happened in 2020, should this ranking be valid. Actually, there will be an Academy Awards presentation next year, so that point is moot; it's very likely that most of the films up for consideration will be films that debuted on streaming services...

  Begun..the Streaming War has..

As for the Birds of Prey characters and how they were depicted in the film..that team has gone through several incarnations in a short time. It began with just Oracle & Black Canary, with occasional appearances from Catwoman & Huntress, but also Male DC Comics characters like Robin, Nightwing and Blue Beetle. The 2002 live-action WB Network TV series debuted just before the comic book had even hit the five-year mark; I remember TV Guide critic Matt Roush dissed the series in just one sentence: "..a mechanical superhero dud that squanders its nifty premise with bad writing & acting." Yikes. Regardless, the comic book continued after that show evaporated, but the notion of having the Huntress be a core member of the team was incorporated into the comics when Gail Simone took over as writer after series co-creator Chuck Dixon left.

As a series, the comic has come a long way from essentially being a riff on Charlie's Angels, but has always been a middling success; in terms of sales, not as well as Batman or Justice League, more like Green Arrow or Hawkman, but better than Aquaman & Wonder Woman, popularity of Jason Mamoa & Gal Gadot notwithstanding. The most successful eras of the book were when Chuck Dixon was writing it in the early years, followed by the first couple years of Gail Simone's run. That was within the first 8 years. It has faltered creatively, been cancelled and relaunched several times the following decade, even rebranded as "Batgirl and The Birds of Prey" after Barbara Gordon, who had been Oracle after "The Killing Joke", became Batgirl again after regaining the use of her legs. The addition of Harley Quinn was inspired by the movie...and, contrary to longtime Birds of Prey fan opinions, I think her presence gives the book a lift - she becomes the straw that stirs the drink; people hate that she replaced Barbara, but I always found Barbara as Oracle to be a boring character. As inpirational & aspirational as Barbara is, whether as Batgirl or Oracle...being Oracle is a desk job. It's just endless panels of a woman sitting at a desk, facing computer screens. I will suggest that this allows for more identification with the audiences who love the character or can relate to her being in a wheelchair, but that's it. When James Tynion had Barbara reprise her role as Oracle, it was a miracle she wasn't put back in a wheelchair again..it just feels like the well has run dry, creatively, in comics right now.

Back to the movie. It is a weakness of it that you can find fan art on the internet that does a better job of outfitting Jurnee Smollett-Bell & Mary Elizabeth Winstead with wardrobe bearing a stronger resemblance to the comic book Black Canary & Huntress, but I thought the actresses made the most of what little they had to do, actually clocking in the same amount of time they usually get in the comic books. Cassandra Cain is not the same character from the comics, but I have noticed recent appearances of the comic book Cassandra incorporate elements of the film version's characterization, though I'm sure her hard core fans are apt to disagree.

Than there's Renee Montoya. This character had an interesting evolution: she starts off as a supporting character created for the 90's Batman cartoons, is then incorporated into the comic books..and then she becomes a new female incarnation of Steve Ditko's vigilante The Question. For this film, screenwriter Christina Hodson went back to the police officer incarnation of the character, offering a different take on her departure from the Gotham Police Department. I liked Rosie Perez, here, but I recall critics thought all of her scenes - and all the scenes with the Male cops in the precinct (her character is the only female cop present) - were cliches. With Batman, Commissioner Gordon and Harvey Bullock kept far offscreen, Montoya is going to be the only good cop in Gotham, a city long-established as being controlled by gangsters, where very few cops & politicians are good - everyone is either shady or looking out for themselves. Given this status quo, it tracks that Montoya would be manic - her only ally at the police department being the female District Attorney, which is a tenuous relationship, because she's her ex-girlfriend. Events play out understandably.

                

Now's as good a time as any to drop my theories about Renee Montoya's presence in this film: I'm watching the scene where Montoya is inexplicably chasing Harley Quinn through the "Pinata Alley" of the Toy District section of downtown Los Angeles, subbing for fictional Gotham City (this is the infamous "Egg Sandwich" scene; given the fuss for fried chicken sandwiches in 2019, this doesn't seem ludicrous to me)...and I'm thinking the chase dosen't make sense...unless it was intended for a different character to be chasing Harley Quinn...

I'm aware that the screenplay went through multiple rewrites. Batgirl was set to appear in this film at one point, until the studio executives decided to aim for having this film be R-rated, because "Joker" was also going to be rated R, but they mandated a core member of Batman's "family" was not going to be in an R movie, so I believe most of the Montoya scenes exist in an earlier draft, in a different context, with Batgirl instead. It would've been Barbara investigating the myterious vigilante (Huntress) who was killing mobsters, randomly chasing Harley through Pinata Alley, forming the team with Huntress, Canary & Cassandra at the end, surviving from getting shot by wearing Harley Quinn's bullet-proof bustier (I'm convinced that's a callback to TKJ)...and having her costume reduced to tatters, which I believe to be a callback to two different sources: a Batgirl arc in "Batman Confidential" where her simple costume is slowly picked apart during multiple brawls in long caper with Catwoman:

And in the 90's Batman cartoon episode, "Harley's Holiday", in which socialite Veronica Vreeland's designer outfit is not able to endure a long day of keeping up with Harley Quinn's antics:

The tone of the film reminded me a lot of "Harley's Holiday" and "Harliquinade" - two Harley Quinn-centric episodes of the 90's series in which Harley's antics leave a trail of destruction, played purely for laughs.

 Black Mask, a 3rd-tier Batman villain similar to Two-Face, with a different psychosis and creepier film noir-esque origin, fares worse than the gangster "Boxy", whose nightclubs get trashed whenever Quinn paid a visit; he's lucky to not suffer the fate of Black Mask in the film - blown up by hand grenade; after all, it was a cartoon for kids! Victor Zsasz is just a stooge in this film, but further proof of why I'm convinced Batgirl was going to be in this is she fought Zsasz before - memorably, for a moment where she pours salt in his open scars:

                       Nice.

So...I thought the movie was good. Definitely would've loved it more with Batgirl, but as-is, we got a live-action, poorly-marketed, farcical crossover that was likely meant to launch a spinoff series but didn't, because the fanbase was either too young to be allowed to buy tickets or miffed by uninspired, lazy, pandering marketing. It's an R-rated live-action film in the spirit of a 90's Batman cartoon (and early-90's superhero films, really), but would probably be downgraded to PG if you compare it to the far-edgier "Harley Quinn" series that debuted on the defunct DC Universe streaming service, but will continue on HBOMax. Barely a year later and it's become quaint..

COVID-19 vs. Comic Books: "That's ALL, Folks"?!

What a difference a week makes!

This germ has bigger muscles than Superman..

The hammer had fallen on Monday. On the week before, the people of the United States were warned to be cautious, stay away from large gatherings, wash their hands, wear gloves, to not cough & sneeze on people, consider rinsing yourself off rather than waste/hoarding toilet paper...but the numbers were climbing, people were taking the Corona virus either too lightly or had no real choice and had to continue going about their day...I saw the comic shop that I go to was selling everything at 20% discount, so I rolled the dice and went in on Friday, saw only 3 people there (luckily, 7 people did not enter the premises, so the 4 of us were safely equidistant), made my purchases and skedaddled promptly.

The quick fox returns to the den from the trip deep down the rabbit hole, covered in dirt on the long way back, yet with tail intact, feeling none the worse for wear and enlightened...

Non-essential is the key word here. Beginning Sunday, all the comic shops that weren't closed are ordered to close. This is something comic book people feared...the death of the Direct Market from having no business, lots of unsold products, no sense of when exactly will they be back in business, no idea if recovery is possible. I see a lot of the shops are turning to online sales for now, but I've also heard & read the word "Non-essential" used to describe books as a low priority for the post offices and other delivery services. Some crowd-funding entrepreneurs think they're being clever by disguising their book bundle in boxes that look like they contain food, but that doesn't sound foolproof. 

So..with all the talk of the Direct Market going down comes talk that the publishers will go down  with them. A lot of the books published within the last two decades were clearly marketed to a specific type of consumer - the guys who spend maybe 30 or 40 dollars minimum per week, who aren't shy with using their debit/credit card. They're usually men, regardless of whom the books are aimed at (I don't really want to bring up Comicsgate vs. SJW audiences in this post, but I will say that the retailers have a right to be concerned if the publisher is cranking out product for a target demographic that's not buying them enough to make healthy sales while losing the longtime consumers who stopped buying when they saw they were phased out and there was nothing new for them). Within the last month, I've seen that the old tricks can still turn a trick:

Y'know...when you hear about a comic book being "sold out", that doesn't mean they were sold to customers walking into the store..it means the retailers purchased all the copies printed by the publisher. If the publisher wants to, they'll offer to print out a Second Edition that the retailers can purchase...and if all the retailers order all the copies from that 2nd then maybe the publisher offers a Third Edition...and of course, none of this means your average consumer brought a copy of either - it could mean the retailers have the copies sitting in storage, hoping that turns into a pile of gold...and it could, now, because ALL the comic shops in the country are closed, indefinitely, so all these new books that are supposed to come out within the next 3 months are either not going to be shipped to stores (because the retailers are hoping for a last-minute reimbursement/cancellation) or take the new books but not order anything new indefinitely until they can see light at the end of the tunnel. The consignment system is tricky because success with comic book sales depends on speculation, which is why a number of shops were depending on toy sales over the last few years...toy stores are not considered "essential" either. 

So for now, the shops are screwed, the publishers are screwed. Lots of doom and gloom talk on social media. I expect a mass implosion when business resumes..lines will be slashed by more than 3/4 - you're only going to see the shops remaining in business fall back in the late-1990s groove of severely under-ordering books, even main Batman books - the "Pull List" is a thing of the past...and what remains of the Direct Market is going to recoil back into the cave-like atmosphere that gave comic shops a stigmatization that never went away. 

The Bubble has burst.

I'm going to have to just wait for the trades to read more about Punchline, the Joker's new girlfriend, who kinda acts like Mercy Graves, Lex Luthor's valet...well, there's only so many personalities a female comic book villain can have, but she looks great.