Endnotes and digressions from the latest show:
* You should follow Vic on Twitter. Seriously. Give him a pity follow: @victorinomatus. Please?
* On the show I said I’d have a video of my new Soul of Chogokin Space Battleship Yamato. You heard some of the sound effects on the show, but I didn’t get the chance to film it. Next week, I promise.
* It was kind of a contentious episode, but the big fight was about elephants. Vic continues to maintain—per some obscure basic cable show—that elephants are afraid of mice. Just like on Tom & Jerry. I don’t the real answer. I’m not a scientist.
All I know is that this video shows a zoo keeper putting a live mouse on top of a resting elephant and then bringing the mouse over to a couple of standing elephants and none of them looks the least bit perturbed.
* So here’s the thing about Wonder Woman: I enjoyed it! There was a lot to like about it, most importantly, as I said on the show, it makes a sophisticated moral argument about the inherent dignity of the human person.
That’s actually the central conflict of the movie. It’s not a story about Princess Diana fighting Ares—it’s a story about Princess Diana struggling with whether or not to believe that humans have an inborn dignity which makes them worth saving regardless of their faults. Good stuff.
There are other things to admire about the movie: I like the way they separate the emotional and moral centers of the film into two different characters. I like Gal Gadot and Chris Pine, both of whom give winning performances. There are two scenes (I describe them in some detail during the show) which are particularly deftly constructed.
All of that said, Wonder Woman is also a movie with some big, gaping flaws. Basic flaws. What is the main character’s power set? Why do they spend time with Chris Pine’s ethnic buddies? Why is Queen Hippolyta a sentimental, hectoring fool? Are Amazons immortal? Why does Diana need a love interest? And those are just the questions stemming from the choices the filmmakers made—there are a whole bunch of other questions about the roads not taken with the Wonder Woman character. (I wanted Darwyn Cooke’s Wonder Woman from The New Frontier because she is intensely interesting.)
What it all adds up to is that Wonder Woman is a minimally-competent superhero movie. Which is great! I love minimally-competent superhero movies. It’s a solid B-, and I give that grade advisedly. When I was taking organic chemistry as an undergraduate, I would have killed a dozen puppies for a B-.
Yet Wonder Woman has become such a cause that we’re now seeing stories talking about its Oscar hopes. No. Really.
* Finally, I went on a little rant about masking and movie presentation. Here are a couple of pieces on the subject, if you’re interested. Just be warned: Once you start paying attention to masking, you can’t ever ignore it when it’s done wrong.
* As always, you can download the episode here and subscribe to the Substandard on iTunes or on Google Play.
