Goodnight, "Lily Collins As Batgirl", GoodKnight, #LilyCollinsBatgirl..

So...this girl...

                    Lily Collins 

...apparently didn't even make the "short list" of actresses whom Warner Brothers eyed with casting for the role of this girl..

                Barbara Gordon 

...the eponymous self-titled hero of her first live-action film, premiering exclusively on HBOMax. Instead, they chose this girl..

             No! Not "That Girl"..

This girl:

                   Leslie Grace 

As the quintessential Batgirl, Barbara Gordon,

  The End of The Beginning Is The    End...

For me, this means I am done suggesting Lily Collins as Batgirl, so this post is a farewell to me suggesting for 3 years, not so subtly, but hopefully not irritatingly, my thoughts that Lily Collins is the best actress for the part; I went far enough to reimagine a popular dream sequence from Twin Peaks as a premonition, farcically, but still, hopefully willing this casting pick into reality..

    "We are like the dreamer who         dreams and lives inside the           dream..but who is the dreamer?"

 I still believe she should've been in contention at least, or in that so-called "short list"

; Leslie Grace is a relatively newcomer, so she has the opportunity to surprise everyone (we hope she does), but to me, Lily would've simply been Batgirl. She is Barbara Gordon.

In the same tradition of that Wonder Woman sequel I imagined that will not happen..

              Ragnarok & Roll

GoodKnight, Lily Collins as Batgirl:

I also have to say "Goodnight" to the possibilities..

   Appearing in "The Flash" as a          late addition to the cast..I'm 80%    certain Leslie is heading to     England to join the crew..

      Playing off Michael Keaton 

           Playing off Ezra Miller

        Playing off Sasha Calle 

     Just looking hot & cool AF...

        Goodnight, GoodKnight..

After They #ReleaseTheSnyderCut ...

Most movies nowadays are filmed on digital cameras and the footage is stored on hard drives, which would be about the same size as the sought-after "Mother Box" that is a key plot device in the live-action Justice League movie.

It's a smartphone, it's a virtual assistant, it's a universal remote, it's a personal computer, it's a pocket calculator, it's an alarm clock, it's a portable dimensional portal generator...

 Snyder kept a separate hard drive containing his copy of the footage he shot - allegedly enough content for a 4 or 5-hours long film...a very different movie from the shortened, reshot film that was presented in theatres under his name by his replacement, Avengers director Joss Whedon, who had been brought in to...make it more like the films at Marvel Studios, effectively giving us The Whedon Cut...

That's not Gal Godat, by the way...that's her stunt double. Godat refused to do that scene. Ezra Miller on the other hand...

And then there's this abomination:

       "What the heck was that!?"

I don't blame Snyder for wanting to disown a cut of a film that he claims used only a quarter of the work he did. This upcoming "Director's Cut" is unfinished business. I remember liking the film we got, but I never rewatched it since. And I still haven't subscribed to any streaming services...I just figure that when "Zack Snyder's Justice League" debuts on HBOMax, it should be good enough to also be released on DVD/BLU-RAY.

         Hey, where's Daffy Duck?

What I find more tantalizing to me is the faint possibility of sequels. I don't dislike Darkseid, but aside from "Rock of Ages", a lot of the Justice League vs. Darkseid stories are pretty flat to me. If Snyder does a sequel to his final cut, it should incorporate elements of one of the few big, epic tales from DC Comics that managed to catch on..I already mentioned "Rock of Ages", but recent news about Marvel Studios having no plans for a "Deadpool 3" started rumors that Ryan Reynolds might come to Warner Brothers to give Green Lantern another try...obviously, it would be more his way than the first go-around, but that got me thinking about Zero Hour:

The CW television series' "Arrowverse" already adapted Crisis On Infinite Earths, so it's natural that Zero Hour gets a look. For one thing, this arc, unlike Crisis, features more of the A-list DC stable, with a lot of fun moments where they encounter different incarnations of each other. How fun would it be to have Robert Pattinson, Michael Keaton and Ben Affleck as different versions of Batman onscreen? Likewise, Henry Cavill, Brandon Routh, Tom Welling and Tyler Hoechin as different versions of Superman? Then there's Batgirl Barbara Gordon having a key role. You could also have Lynda Carter, Grant Gustin, Stephen Amell...it goes on..

  That's right..Lily Collins is Batgirl.

The plot of "Zero Hour" is Crisis in miniature - a villain named Extant appears to be screwing with timelines, resulting in characters from parallel worlds interacting with each other...then it's revealed that Extant was just a puppet for Hal Jordan, who had become drunk-with-power villain Parallax in the 1990's, in his scheme to rewrite history...which sounds like Thanos with the Infinity Gauntlet..

I do find Hal as Parallax a more-interesting villain than Darkseid, plus, Reynolds has more of a beat to play than he did before - I wouldn't mind if the film adaptation of "Zero Hour" reveals that he is being used as a puppet by Darkseid, obviously ditching the character of Extant entirely and improvising this new arc that opens up things here and there. Extant was too sketchy to be interesting, despite Geoff Johns efforts to bring him back..

      Eh...the stuff that 'back issue'          boxes are full of...

Besides, Reynolds' experience filming "Green Lantern" had rewards of it's own..

            Blake Lively is a fox..

Justice League: Zero Hour...that's a sequel I want to see..ironically based on a quarter of the actual plot of the mini-series that it's based on, but there's a nice symmetry in that...Avengers: Infinity War & Endgame don't exactly resemble Jim Starlin's Infinity Gauntlet, either.

About That Justice League Movie...

Justice League made it's money back, but with only a little bit of "fun money" for profit. I liked it, but I liked Wonder Woman and Batman vs. Superman, but not Man of Steel and kinda lukewarm towards Suicide Squad, so I wasn't insistent on some fidelity to every element of what came before.

Beat for beat, this Justice League movie seemed to be replicating plot points from Joss Whedon's first Avengers film, even borrowing the same auteur for reshoots/band-aids to inject doses of humor/empathy from its stars, as if to keep it from looking like a video game. I'm not a fan of the Avengers films - those two movies look like an assembly of well-paid, attractive people wearing/posing in various costumes and reciting patches of dialogue during an expensive photo shoot. The audiences collective  imagination did all the heavy lifting and applied context behind the magnitude of what we're seeing...I'm going to go on record and say the one film I truly enjoyed from Marvel Studios was Thor: Ragnarok.

It wasn't false advertising - we did get all of DC Comics best-known superheroes and Cyborg (again, lagniappe, though he's appeared a lot in cartoons, so he's not obscure), PLUS...a lot of Gal Godat, looking phenomenal and memorizing. We also get Ezra Miller as The Flash, looking like the son of Jimmy Fallon & Carrie Brownstein and unintentionally pissing off hardcore fans of Grant Gustin, the TV Flash, but I think Miller's performance does a better job at selling the character's humorous side..maybe to the point where he might've been better-cast as Plastic Man, but that character wasn't in the cards. And how is Ben as Batman? Much has been texted around the net about Affleck looking like he'd rather be elsewhere nowadays, but I think they're misreading his performance...and he's not bothering to clue anyone in. Ben's Batman seems to act more at-ease when he's wearing the batsuit and more tightly wound in civilian clothes, as if he needs to overcompensate for not wearing a batsuit in Bruce's dealings with others. It's a subtle thing that's completely ignored, but it makes his Batman/Bruce Wayne more interesting than Christian Bale or Clooney and Kilmer. Michael Keaton's Batman has an added gravitas; modern reception to Adam West's Batman has a lot of goodwill. And Kevin Conroy just has the quintessential voice you want Batman to have. Affleck's Bat seems a little closer to something iconic mired by appearing in ambivalently-received films. Pity that his next appearance might be a supporting role in Flashpoint, since it's the same rut with Mark Ruffalo not appearing in a solo Hulk film. I do wish Affleck had just gone ahead and filmed his script for The Batman as initially planned. As some consolation prize, we got a cameo by Joe Manganiello as Slade Wilson (Deathstroke), who would've been the main villain in Affleck's film.

I want to say the fault lies with the story. If you don't want to have the guys fight Darkseid just yet, then, instead of Steppenwolf (which sounded like a missed opportunity to feature music from the rock band with the similar-sounding name)  have them fight a psychotic mind-controlling starfish, instead. I'm not kidding - the first-ever Justice League of America adventure featured a battle with Starro, a massive alien starfish. The first Avengers film aped the first issue of that comic book by featuring a battle against Loki, so why didn't the Justice League fight Starro? Would it be too silly-looking? Heaven forbid. The only really interesting element of Jack Kirby's Fourth World concept to me were the Mother Boxes, because they foresaw the invention of miniature computers: pocket calculators, digital notebooks, laptops, smartphones, iPads..etc - except in this film, where they'd depicted as big, clunky cubes. I also enjoyed his parody of Stan Lee's public image with the Funky Flashman character..and about 45% of Mister Miracle, but...The King was a really clunky writer..

I had no problem with the cast, the crew or the shorter length of the film..but I do believe it suffered from the lack of a dazzling story beyond an apology for trying to make Superman a darker character over the last decade and just having the big guns...come together. I don't know if fighting a giant starfish or a gang of thugs dressed like playing cards would've been better, but it would've offered more-appealing visuals that cued audiences about what the movie was going to try to be...

Fun.

About That Wonder Woman Sequel...

Wonder Woman surprised everyone by being a good movie. Especially since it's a follow-up to a very polarizing movie - Batman vs. Superman: Dawn of Justice. I liked both films, but a lot of people possibly prefer WW as a standalone, an eye in a tornado that is DC Films. What do I mean by that? It's the only one everyone likes in that stable. For now. Justice League is coming out soon.

Let's stay with Wonder Woman for this post. Development on the sequel is happening. Gal Godat is coming back to star, Partty Jenkins is coming back to direct. But what will the story be?...The wartime setting had been kicked around as a backdrop for the first film for decades - as far back as the 90's, when the short list of possible candidates for the lead included Sandra Bullock, Lucy Lawless and the fan-favorite choice, Catherine Zeta Jones. Now..just because this first movie was set in WWI doesn't mean Wonder Woman 2 should be set in WW2. I liked the rumor about a 2nd and 3rd film being set in different decades leading up to the present. Or they could rip-off the approach used by Marvel Studios' Captain America films by embedding the sequels deep into a bigger storyline that connected with other sequels. One thing for certain: forget about the comics. This Wonder Woman is purely a new incarnation created for the screen; they name-dropped a number of comic book creators in the credits, but they're just being polite. There are no good/great Wonder Woman stories from the comics. Similar deal with Marvel's Thor and Captain America; you could argue that Winter Soldier and Civil War are based on storylines from the books, but only loosely; I still believe the best Thor story was the one where Loki turned him into a frog...

And it's only in Thor: Ragnarok where it looks like the studio is embracing the character's Silver Age for the first time, after the very drab-looking Thor: The Dark World and a lightweight, derivative Thor, this is the first time we get the movie Thor wearing his Helmet, albeit a stylized version of it. This film looks good enough to copy..

Here's my idea: I don't know if Greek mythology has an equivalent of the Norse Ragnarok, but I think sticking Wonder Woman in a parallel to that would be really cool. Her rogues gallery has Circe and The Cheetah - 2 villains that counter nicely with Hela and Loki. I remember John Byrne had Etrigan the Demon guest-star in some issues from his tenure on the Wonder Woman comics, so with there's a good counterpart of the Hulk who Wonder Woman could fight and later team-up with. I keep hearing about a live-action Justice League Dark film in development, so having Etrigan appear with Wonder Woman...is really good for business. Plus, whoever is cast as Etrigan's human counterpart Jason Blood will get to have dialogue with Godat, to make up for the absense of Chris Pines' Steve Trevor, so it won't just seem like special effects, special effects, special effects. The only casting choice I have is Ana de Armas as The Cheetah; I'm not sure which take on the character they'll use, but she's Wonder Woman's most-popular adversary..kinda like an MMA fighter version of Catwoman. Ana de Armas is kinda the new flavor of the month on the heels of Blade Runner: 2049, so she'd be interesting...the way it might not to interesting to see someone more familiar in the part.

What's the plot? Whatever the basic plot of Thor: Ragnarok is. The Cheetah is impersonating Hippolyta so that Circe can takeover Paradise Island/Themyscira..which kinda reminds me of the island from Shakespeare's play The Tempest..so who says Zeus/Merlin/Shazzam/Prospero didn't camp there? Did I just link Zeus thematically with Merlin and Prospero and am I the first to have suggested this? That's a fun mystery/subplot that could link these disparate characters nicely. Why the heck not? Ares was shown to be alive and well - before Diana killed him, of course - why not reveal Zeus as Merlin/Shazzam/Prospero and Circe (Miranda) as his illegitimate daughter, intending to restore her birthright by conquering the Amazons?

So after all the bread and circuses of Diana beating Etrigan in an arena battle, the Cheetah is revealed as impersonating Hippolyta, so Circe drops in, then Diana & Etrigan team-up as they're chased, i.e., hunted throughout Themyscira by mind-controlled Amazons led by Circe and Cheetah...as both parties search for some big MacGuffin...a rock shaped like a thunderbolt, the "Orb of Bachfyre" - thesolution to where Hippolyta went...and it turns out to be...a Mother Box! Hippolyta was kidnapped by Granny Goodness to train an army of female furies to conquer New Genesis! Hippolyta gets swapped with Circe and Cheetah in the Boom tube and Granny Goodness enlists them as her new furies...because who cares about Lashina, Mad Harriet and Stompa?..although I can see Aubrey Plaza as Lashina or Mad Harriet...and so the film ends as the next step in the buildup to the ultimate confrontation with Darkseid and makes Wonder Woman's corner of the DCU more central to the film universe's shenanigans.

That's my idea...now I wonder what Thor: Ragnarok and Justice League are about..