I’d have to say both episodes of Gotham and Sleepy Hollow this week left me feeling a bit meh. It feels like the episodes are, dare I say it, becoming formulaic. And yet, I must be a servant of Moloch because I will most likely live-tweet again next week. The question is, will Moloch (a.k.a., the God Demon of Child Sacrifice) reward me for my loyal viewing?
Here are some choice tweets for this week’s episodes of Gotham and Sleepy Hollow, “Balloonman” and “Root of All Evil,” respectively. For more, check out the hashtags #Gotham and #YungGotham for the Batman prequel and #SleepyHeads and #SleepyHolla for some great tweets. And check out Keith’s take on last night’s Gotham.
Last week, I got some grief for writing about why I was done with Gotham. So naturally, I not only tuned in for Episode 3, “The Balloonman,” I live-tweeted it as well. The fact that this episode had nothing to do with the B-side to Prince’s “Batdance” was already strike number one for me.
I won’t go into all of the problems I have with the show’s premise — since I already did that. A couple times. I will say that I realize that the reason I’m so bitter about this show is because I always wanted a Gotham Central series, and that Fox’s attempt is just a half-assed one. Because Gotham Central is the non-Batman police procedural series we deserve, just not the one we’re getting right now, apparently.
I tried to like Gotham, honest, I did. Despite my previous reservations, I tuned into the firsttwo episodes like everyone else in the geek-o-sphere did. And you know what, I didn’t hate it. At least not as much as I was anticipating. In fact, some of what I saw was quite good. But the problems I had remained. Namely, that the whole conceit of the show is that it exists in the Batman universe. Also, the acting is pretty horrible. I’m looking at you, Ben and Jada!
If this were just a typical police procedural, I’d find it pretty entertaining (even though I’m not a fan of the genre). Where the show loses me, though, is that it fundamentally misunderstands the universe in which it has chosen to partake. Case in point? They’ve just cast 34-year old actor Nicholas D’Agosto to play Harvey Dent.
Monday nights are just full of nerdy goodness. First with Gotham and then Sleepy Hollow on FOX. It’s been fun live-tweeting both episodes back-to-back. Here are some choice tweets for the second episodes of Gotham and Sleepy Hollow, “Selina Kyle” and “The Kindred,” respectively.
Gotham wasn’t the only high-profile NOC-friendly series to debut on FOX last night. Immediately following was the second season premiere of Sleepy Hollow, and since I was already on twitter, we live-tweeted that too! You could’ve followed along with the hashtags #SleepyHeads and #SleepyPremiere.
If you missed any of the live-tweets, find them on Storify here. Some highlights are after the jump.
Since last night was the kickoff to the new fall season, I was tasked with watching the FOX network for two straight hours, with Gotham debuting and NOC-favorite Sleepy Hollow returning. Fortunately, I was joined by the lovely folks on twitter since I was live tweeting both shows on the official NOC twitter, using the hashtags #GothamPremiere and #YungGotham.
If you didn’t get a chance to follow along, here’s a Storify for my live-tweets of the Gotham pilot. Check back later for the Sleepy Hollow one. I’ve also highlighted some choice tweets below as well.
I finally saw X-Men: Days of Future Past at our local close-to-DVD-release cheap theater that we South Minneapolitans all love, The Riverview. I loved it. I knew a few of the main comics discrepancies beforehand, but they didn’t bother me. It was gripping, the effects were sick, and I for me personally, I’m not sure there’s a limit to great acting performances once Jennifer Lawrence and Michael Fassbender hit the screen in damn near everything they do. All of that said, once I was waiting for the credits and the usual Marvel post-flick teaser, I started thinking about something else: Ferguson, MO.
I’m throwing a temper tantrum over this one. Christian Bale cannot play Moses. No. I know arguing against the whitewashing of a Biblical character is a lost cause, and wandering into any mainstream Christian church decked out with portraits of a blue-eyed Jesus Christ should indicate that the tide isn’t changing anytime soon, but I still find myself just a little more perturbed than average to see Batman play the savior of the Hebrews.
Maybe it’s because in recent years we’ve seen a new wave of white outrage against racebending traditionally white characters. Racebending refers to altering the canonical race of a character. Whitewashing is a type of racebending wherein non-white characters become white or are not included whatsoever. For simplicity’s sake, this piece will use the term whitewashing to refer to that absence of colored folks, while racebending will be used to refer to white characters becoming non-white. Those aren’t exact definitions, but hey, if Christian Bale can play Moses, then I can bend a couple of rules too.
In 1992, when I was only eight years old, my Batman knowledge was near non-existent. All I had to go on was the old Adam West Batman series that would repeat endlessly on the now-defunct Family Channel and Tim Burton’s Batman Returns, a movie that was too Tim Burton for my tastes. However, like any other kid, I loved cartoons. Getting home after school, my ritual was to grab a snack and watch The Disney Afternoon or Tiny Toon Adventures. Like the Adam West Batman, these shows were all lighthearted and mostly innocent.
Oh, I love me a good origin story. For those who loved Christopher Nolan’s Dark Knight trilogy starring Christian Bale and a panoply of excellent actors, this fall’s Fox television series Gotham will be giving us a chance to revisit Bruce Wayne as a young boy when the city was as dank and gross as Times Square in the 70s.
Sensing it might have a hit on its hands, Fox’s marketing department has gone into overdrive promoting the show. After releasing an official trailer and first look preview, eight new character posters were just unveiled by Entertainment Weekly. Apparently, they’re celebrating Bat Week, too.
Here are some initial thoughts on the latest live action take on the Batman universe.
A while back, I shared a couple of lists I curated of DC superheroes and their Academy Awards. It’s a hobby I picked up a bunch of years ago because I’m as much of an Oscars junkie as I am a superhero movie one. I hinted that I would tackle a similar list featuring the actors of the Marvel Cinematic Universe, but instead, I decided to take on the Oscar winners and nominees from that other multi-movie Marvel megafranchise: the X-Men.
Part of the reason is because X-Men: Days of Future Past just shattered a ton of Memorial Day box office numbers on its way to a $111 million opening. Also, with seven movies spanning fourteen years under its belt, the X-Men franchise is just as deep as the Batman and Superman oeuvres, though the mutants have far less noms and wins than DC’s big two.
Against my better judgement, I’m starting to get excited for more live action Batman stuff. I’m bound to be disappointed, I know. But this moment is the reason we are fans. Twitter teases and casting announcements that lead to forum posts full of speculation — often times, it’s the buildup to a thing that is more exciting than the thing itself. And during these last two days, I have officially shifted from being cautiously optimistic about future Bat offerings like Gotham and the Superman sequel I hope isn’t called Batman Vs. Superman to being the easily excitable fanboy that gets giddy about stuff like this.
We’ll start with Gotham. And then we’ll talk about that picture at the top of this post.
On Monday night, during the broadcast of the much-hyped return of Jack Bauer in 24: Live Another Day, the Fox network treated viewers to a first look at a similarly hyped new series that will makes its debut later this fall. That new show is none other than Gotham, and on the same day the trailer was released, it was announced that the show was already greenlit for a full season, no less.
So here’s your first taste of actual real footage below, and I’ll share my first impressions on the other side of two minutes:
Last week, the other NOCs convened a Roundtable to hash out their feelings about the cancellation of Almost Human. I did not join in because I wanted some time to sit with my thoughts about the show and contemplate what Fox was attempting to do this television season.
Best as I can figure, Fox was clearly fishing in somewhat uncharted waters. On one hand, sitcoms like Brooklyn Nine-Nine and Dads showed the network’s commitment to a tried-and-true comedy formula peripheral to the nerd media diaspora. In the case of the former, it worked like a charm. Brooklyn Nine-Nine, having won the Golden Globe for best comedy in its rookie season, will likely be a staple in Fox’s weeknight lineup for several seasons. I expect the latter — Dads — will end up on the chopping block soon enough (despite rumors it might survive to a second season).
As for Almost Human, I feel like it and another oft-discussed show on our beloved forum — Sleepy Hollow — represented much riskier forays in new TV content.
So the inevitable finally happened. After a season of steadily declining ratings and even more weeks of speculation. Fox finally pulled the plug on the J.J. Abrams-produced sci-fi series Almost Human. The show, which starred Karl Urban and Michael Ealy, was a popular one — around NOC HQ, at least — and will definitely be missed.
To bid the show a fond farewell, the Nerds once again took to the Roundtable to pay their respects.
Now that Black actor Michael B. Jordan has been officially cast as Johnny Storm (a.k.a. Human Torch) in the new Fantastic Four movie, all the negative crap has started to spew (again). We’ve all heard the crap before: “Johnny Storm is white!!! That’s Like casting a white actor as Martin Luther King, Jr!” Well, dumbass racist, it’s actually nothing like that. Johnny Storm is a fictional character. Martin Luther King Jr. being played by a white actor would like… well… it would be kind of like this…
Perpetuating stereotypes isn’t just immoral — it’s bad TV. That’s why shows like Sleepy Hollow are so crucial.
When I was seven, I asked my mom if I could dye my hair blond and get blue contact lenses. It’s probably the first serious conversation I ever had about my appearance and all I wanted to do was look like Luke Skywalker. I wanted it so badly. She was appalled and I couldn’t understand why. Star Wars was Everything. There were no Latinos running through the halls of the Death Star, blasting storm troopers. Of course I was caught up.
I guess Bryan Singer has a complex about Marvel movie announcements that aren’t about the X-Men. Back in October, on the same day Disney/Marvel released the long-awaited trailer for Captain America: The Winter Soldier, Singer and Fox Instagrammed a teaser vid of their own X-Men: Days of Future Past trailer. So last week, when Sony debuted their trailer for The Amazing Spider-Man 2, Singer took to twitter to divert the attention of those fans who might have been willing to give Marc Webb’s sequel a chance:
Also because the internet has a short attention span. If the X-Men eighth-quel is indeed about the classic “Age of Apocalypse” storyline from the 90s — in which a mutant time-travels to the past and accidentally kills Xavier, thus setting off an alternate timeline in which Magneto assembles the X-Men, only to have Apocalypse choose that moment to launch a war that places mutants at the top of the food chain because he slaughters humans by the millions (holy run-ons, Batman!) — then that would mean back-to-back alternate timeline movies for the X-Men. But it got the Nerds to reflect on other media that took advantage of the alternate timeline/evil twin conceit. So we took to the Roundtable once again.
As of April 2013, The Avengers had grossed more than $600 million dollars in the US, a box office performance that has nearly tripled its (already bloated) production budget. It would be fair to say that if you’re a Hollywood movie producer, The Avengers makes you very, very, very happy.In fact, you’re hoping to make as many Avengers franchises as you possibly can.
Against this backdrop of undeniable success, it seems major Hollywood production companies are hoping to do just that. For the last few months, the Internet has been a-buzz with casting rumours for Man of Steel 2: first with news that Ben Affleck was being tapped to play an aging Batman, and last week with the announcement that virtually unknown actress Gal Gadot (of Fast and Furious franchise fame) was assuming the mantle of Wonder Woman. Although fans have long clamoured for a live-action Justice League adaptation, the fact that all three members of the heralded DC Trinity will be making an appearance in Man of Steel 2 — a movie that we all expected would be just another Superman solo vehicle — is clear indication that WB/DC has drawn inspiration from the Marvel Cinematic Universe, and is looking to fast-track the Justice League movie by rapidly introducing other characters to the silver screen. Fans have since speculated that while Gadot might make a minimal cameo in Man of Steel 2, it’s likely that she will subsequently headline her own Wonder Woman movie that would further stoke the fires for a full Justice League film.
Before the season started, we did an episode of “Hard N.O.C. Life” in which we talked about the shows we were excited for. Sleepy Hollow made the cut, but we speculated that the show would probably be terrible. That said, we were all intrigued by the premise. Several episodes in, and it’s become one of the buzziestshows on television. It’s also one of the most diverse, with article after article pointing to its importance as a bellwether for diversifying TV’s primetime landscape.
Shows what we know for shitting on it back in August. Well, not all of us did. Jasonsang the show’s praises as soon as the pilot premiered.
To look back at the first half of Sleepy Hollow‘s debut season, some of the Nerds assembled around the Roundtable once again. Here’s what they think of the show:
In the last week, Marvel Studios released trailers for next year’s slate of superhero fare, and if these teasers are any indication, Warner Bros. is going to have some catching up to do — even if they did manage to shoehorn Batman into the Man of Steel sequel. Still, the only thing interesting about the Batman/Superman movie is that they filmed a football game between Metropolis and Gotham, this time withoutHines Ward. Meanwhile, the Marvel Cinematic Universe (via Disney) and the X-Universe (via Fox) are simultaneously laying down the gauntlet for dope movie trailers (we shall see if the actual movies live up to the promise of the previews).
But right now, all we have are the trailers, and they’re both pretty spectacular.
Yesterday, FOX TV announced it is developing a new DC Comics-based drama for the 2014-2015 television season. Called Gotham, the show, created by The Mentalist‘s Bruno Heller, will focus on the exploits of Detective James Gordon and his early days in the Gotham City Police Department. Since this is an origin story for Gordon, Batman and his Rogues Gallery will not feature into it — though the announcement mentions Gotham’s colorful villains, I’m not sure how you include them if this is a pre-Batman time period. While I’m always down for more TV shows based on comics, I’m actually not sure what to think about this.
At least the show already has a theme song:
I’ve long been a proponent for a television series based on one of my favorite Batman books of all time, Gotham Central. The book reads like a crime procedural and spotlights a diverse cast of characters, including Renee Montoya, Crispus Allen, Maggie Sawyer, and Josie Mac. Unfortunately, the book’s initial run did not sell very well — probably because Commissioner Gordon and Batman, though their presence is felt throughout, were not the focus of the book — and the series ended after 40 issues. And though there were rumors of a potential Gotham Central television show in the early 2000s, it never materialized. Silver lining? We got Christopher Nolan’s Dark Knight Trilogy instead. So the idea of a show based on the Gotham police department isn’t a new one. How they shoehorn Jim Gordon’s origin into this remains to be seen.
