Trailer Trash - San Diego Comic-Con

Let's make last year's one off into an annual tradition, as I present my run down of the new trailers from SDCC, starting with the offerings from Netflix.

Stranger Things 2 – and yes, they are trailing it as a numbered sequel – promises more of the same glorious eighties retro horror that the first season gave us, with Will Byers' mind still half-trapped in the Upside Down, and thus able to see some vast, Cthuloid horror looming over the town of Hawkins Indiana. The trailer confirms that Eleven will be returning, alongside our other young heroes, and of course Hop the inexplicably badass, whom we will probably spend another entire season expecting to die horribly. I hope he doesn't. There's little sign of any human antagonists, but I suspect that there will be some.

Also, 'Thriller'. Vincent Price, still doing the business almost a quarter of a century after his passing. If that isn't a fitting tribute to a horror actor, I don't know what is.

Also in the field of original urban horror/fantasy (although definitely less original and more fantasy) is Bright, a sort of mashup of Alien Nation, any film where a group of ostensibly respectable protagonists find a fortune in hostile territory(1), and Shadowrun(2), with Will Smith as an LAPD veteran assigned the first orc cop as his partner in a world where humans live alongside fantasy races (presumably due to relatively recent shenanigans given the otherwise now-ness of the world.) From the looks of it, orcs have fallen into the lower class, while elves have joined the 1%, because fucking elves, dude.

Will and Orc arrest an elf carrying a magic wand, described as 'a nuclear weapon that grants wishes.' Several of their fellow cops appear to want the wand to 'disappear' into their pockets, and there are elves and all sorts after it, with our heroes trying to get it safely to... somewhere. So there's a bit of the Warriors in the old CNA(3) as well. It looks kind of mad, although a bit as if it might have benefited from a miniseries rather than a movie to be contentiously released only through Netflix. I mean, I'd pay out to see this at the cinema.

The latest trailer for The Defenders shows our team somewhat less united than they might once have appeared, with basically everyone but Danny Rand opposed to either a team up or Chinese food. From this brief glimpse I already feel more sympathy for Danny, as he's so obviously the little kid with the bad solo series situation who just wants to hang out with the cool kids and pretend he has a fanbase that love him. There are also some signs of him doing something more interesting with his chi powers than just punching really hard. However, most of what we get from this trailer is Sigourney Weaver's Alexandra and her plans for Manhattan, which feel distinctly League of Shadows. We see her coaching Elektra on war, goading our heroes on how they suck, and holding her own in a glowering contest with Madame Gao, which is no small feat.

There was also a character teaser, which ended with the Punisher putting in an appearance.

From there, let's jump to non-Netflix Marvel TV shows.

After a deeply underwhelming first trailer, Marvel's Inhumans (henceforth Inhumans) got a longer reveal with some added SFX, in particular Medusa's hair doing its thing. Also of significant note is a scene of Iwan Rheon getting some man of the people vibes, as well as being sassed for being 'only human.' As of now, I've got to say that I'm on team Maximus. Inhumans joins Agents of SHIELD on ABC and for my money looks to have the same slick production values and hints of the same lack of truly engaging characters. Black Bolt is a barely expressive beefcake, which is not a good start for a character who can't talk. There's a lot of work to doing that character well, and just looking noble and stoic doesn't cut it.

Anyway, I probably ought to get caught up on Agents of SHIELD at some point.

From the non-MCU side of things we get a longer trailer for The Gifted, Fox's upcoming offering within the X-Men multiverse (presumably a slightly different corner thereof than Legion.) It's your classic brother and sister mutants are hunted by the agency that once employed their father scenario, with said father reaching out to a group of other mutants – canon X-Men characters Thunderbird, Blink and Polaris, and light-bending newbie Eclipse – to help the family disappear. What's really interesting about this one is that, alongside Agents of SHIELD and a few other shows, it defies the unwritten convention that representation means 20-25% female cast and one minority. The Gifted has 50% female cast in its protagonist group (half of the established mutants, one of the newbies, one of the parents,) and Native American, Chinese and Hispanic characters in the lead group(4).

It's probably telling that my other takeaway from this is not the action, the effects or the poignant and tragic tale of vampire export Stephen Moyer trying to recreate the existential dilemma of Horn-Rimmed Glasses in the good season of Heroes, but that a male and female character are shown discussing relationships with no apparent UST.

From Marvel to DC now, and let's start where the CW started, with Arrow.

We open with a recap of the end of Season 5 and the explosion of Lian Yu. New footage shows that Will is haunted by what happened, and as he is seemingly living with single dad Oliver we can assume Mum didn't make it off the island. No sign of Felicity yet, or Diggle, but Echo Kellum shows up in some of the marketing, so we can hope that they're not burying the gay guy yet. The other confirmed survivors are the Dinahs Lance and Drake, apparently engaging in a protracted feud, and Slade Wilson, last seen leaving the rest of the team in the lurch (although a scene of him shaking hands with Oliver tells against him having gone full heel again.)

I'll be honest, I came out of this a little unclear who the villain of the series might be, and I'm worried it's going to be existential angst and that Arrow Season 6 is going to turn out to be Arrow's Buffy Season 6, all pain and misery and crushing mundanity. On the other hand, I could go for a proper musical episode(5).

The Flash goes into Season 4 lacking a certain... Flash. Barry is still stuck in the Speed Force, leaving Iris to coordinate the emotionally battered members of the team, including Caitlin, who appears to be going with a freeze ray look this season, but not Julian apparently. It pitches us a massive samurai dude as our major villain, although that might just be a lever for bringing Barry home. We get even less hint of the overall plot than with the other shows – this makes sense; most of their episodes probably haven't filmed yet, so we've only got some early episode stuff to show – but it's a sadder and a wiser world on display, and... well, I miss Season 1's sense of fun.

Also lacking somewhat in her habitual joie de vivre is Supergirl, who is moping over the loss of Mon-el and deciding to 'retire' Kara Danvers to be a full time Supergirl. Now, Mon-el grew on me as a character, and I like the juxtaposition of Kara's self-sacrifice with Superman's commitment to personal relationships, but seriously if the moping goes on for more than a couple of weeks I may flip a table. It's not just that I like my happy Supergirl, because I accept that it's not unreasonable that the kind of shit superheroes deal with would wear you down, but that I don't want to see her brung low by love of a man. Mourn, mope, move on(6).

Anyway, we also get a glimpse of Adrian Pasdar as an evil businessman threatening to get all up in Lena Luthor's grill, Alex and Maggie being alternately adorable and badass as all hell, and Supergirl heat visioning the shit out of something. Again, no substantial sign of our big bad yet(7).

If I was worried that the Arrowverse was going into complete angst overload, Legends of Tomorrow drops a season 3 trailer to soothe my worries, with dinosaurs in LA and Mick Rory going after a clown wielding a giant hammer. With anachronisms all across history as a result of their Spear of Destiny shenanigans, modern-day Vixen's dead evil sister popping up, and some sort of time feds getting all up in Sara's face about her team's ability to handle a super-secret rising darkness situation, our band of misfits look to be saddling up for another season of balls to the wall goofball action and occasional moments of poignancy, more in keeping with its glorious sophomore year than its rocky beginnings.

As bad as the head-pasties were, I kind of got used to them, and I can't help finding the Kelvinverse Klingons a little offputting(8). Presumably we’ll see somewhere in this series the genetic accident that produces the Original Series Klingons, before they reverted to the movie/Next Gen appearance.

Where was I?

Right; so the new Star Trek: Discovery trailer promises action, thrills and war, and it's all our slightly gung-ho protagonist's fault. I strongly suspect, looking at this, that Michelle Yeo's character won't make it past the early episodes before being replaced by Lucius Malfoy, which is a bit of a shame, but it is as it is. All in all, the look is very Kelvinverse – not just the Klingons – even if the continuity isn't. I wonder if the show is going for more of a serial vibe than previous Star Trek series, which tended to be more a collection of individual stories than a single arc.

We open with William Hartnell morphing seamlessly into David Bradley, which is really uncanny. I assumed at first they just reshot with Bradley and showed the first bit in black and white. It seems to confirm that we're opening at the point where the First Doctor is about to regenerate, although what follows with its 'frozen moment' looks more like WWI. Mark Gatiss is a wide-eyed army officer known only as 'The Captain' at this point. Time Lord? Psychic projection of the Doctor's fear of being an officer? Lethbridge-Stewart senior, perhaps(9)? A reappearance for Bill as a physical being suggests to me that a lot of this is going to be in the Doctors' mind, which is not to say that I find it unlikely that super-powerful water-being Bill could find her way into such a construct.

Not much to go on here, but apparently we're looking at the adventures of Catherine Langford, action schoolgirl. Interestingly, if this is supposed to be in continuity with SG-1 and she goes through the Gate at all, then she was presumably lying through her teeth to Daniel and the others for years. On the other hand, perhaps the Stargate won't ever be opened; who can say.

Again, very little specific here. We see the hosts - led by Delores and her faithful Teddy - purging the park of tourists, and what looks to be a push back from the company, as well as the pianola being upgraded to juke box mode. Most intriguingly, we have the Man in Black still around. I kind of want to go back and remind myself where he was shot...

Okay, movie time.

It's obviously early days on production of the Pacific Rim sequel, with this teaser trailer featuring little footage and instead taking the form of a mock recruiting ad for the Jaeger programme, featuring a voice over by GLaDOS (once more, Ellen McCain's filters are at full GLaDOS for the trailer.) I want McCain to do a song for the credits on this one, I really do.

Steven Spielberg's much-anticipated adaptation of Ernest Cline's Ready Player One gets its first showing in this teaser, which is as packed with 1980s retro imagery as you would expect, from Duke Nukem to the Iron Giant.

The astute among you will of course have noted that both Duke Nukem and (the movie version of) The Iron Giant are from the 1990s, and this is indicative of a general problem with the movie. It's not 80s enough by a long stretch. The Oasis is a highly sophisticated simulated reality, yes, and much of it is no doubt super-futuristic and impossible high def, but especially those parts of it designed by Halliday really ought to look more eighties, and in these days of Stranger Things, Far Cry: Blood Dragon and even Thor: Ragnarok, there's little excuse for mucking this one up.

Now, don't get me wrong, I recognise that there is a huge step to be taken in adapting a novel much of which consists of the protagonist playing cabinet arcade games or being inserted into seminal eighties nerd movies, and the giant Hot Wheels track race is a great image, but overall it just looks too... 2017, and has too much from the 90s in it. Apparently retro-futurism – or is this future-retroism? – ain't what it used to be.

Kingsman was a divisive film in a lot of ways. I found it to be interesting, but flawed. From the looks of things, this sequel has managed to slim down the concept a lot by jettisoning the interest and keeping the flaws. Roxy/Lancelot, who got only a single shot in the original trailer, here has... nothing. She's gone. Eggsy, meanwhile, continues to be boorish, arrogant and rude, and yet his mentor seems to be questioning the American Statesman organisation's understanding of the creedo 'Manners Maketh Man.' At this point, I'm really more interested in Statesman.

The times they are a changing, and no better sign of that – in this rundown at least – than the shift in Justice League's focus from Batman to Wonder Woman in this trailer as compared to last year's SDCC trailer. It's not that Batman has gone, but Wonder Woman is front and centre here, as befits the most experienced warrior, not just in the Justice League, but pretty much in the entire world, if Themiscyra really is going to be the first place destroyed by Steppenwolf. There's a reference to the Lanterns, and a few hints that Superman will turn up (because that would be a shocker at this point, right?) although I would punch the air if it turns out that our super-costumed cavalry was Kara Zor-el. There is also a shift to the Wonder Woman colour palette, and a few Whedonisms thrown in for good measure (most notably 'They really just vanished. That's rude.')

Other thoughts: The trailer is playing up the Flash's doubts to the point that I suspect they will remember that he is basically the most powerful of them all, since on his A game he's untouchable, unstoppable, and could phase a brick into Superman's heart if he really wanted to. Plus, time travel. I strongly suspect that we'll see him be pivotal to the final save in the film, and quite possibly getting lost in time as a consequence.

Also, boom tube! I wonder if they'll call it that in the movie?

And finally, on top of their TV shows, Marvel dropped a new trailer for Thor: Ragnarok which is epic AF. We get to see the actual Team Thor – sadly, Darryl doesn't seem to get a look in – with a prominent role for Bruce Banner/Hulk, as well as more scenes of Hela dominating the Asgardian forces. The rest of Team Thor is filled out by frenemies Valkyrie and Loki, with sadly little sign of recurring favourites, unless that's Sif leading the flying horse cavalry that Hela's winding up to slaughter. I hope they don't kill off Sif. It would be a poor lookout for all of the sub-franchise's supporting female characters to end up dead or absent. The other thing I noted was the bit at the end where he appears to have internalised the powers previously only granted by Mjolnir, which makes a certain amount of sense given that it was always described as 'the power of Thor.'

Of course, the really notable thing is that this trailer is way, way more eighties than anything in Ready Player One, from the music to the title card(10). It's a high risk design strategy, but one that seems to be paying off to judge by the response.

So that's this year's trailers. Of course there are others, but mostly for stuff I don't or won't watch, so I don't have much to say on that front.

(1) I'm thinking Three Kings, I'm thinking Trespass...

(2) And with shades of Defiance in its pale, fancy elves.

(3) Cinematic Nucleic Acid, the building blocks of film.

(4) After that it's pretty much Caucasians, all the way down, but progress is progress.

(5) Disappointingly, the Flash/Supergirl musical crossover only had one original number, tellingly the highlight of the episode.

(6) With life. I'm not advocating she get a new boyfriend straight away. If I haven't made it clear before, I would be more than happy with the character establishing herself as okay outside the bounds of a relationship.

(7) Not Doomsday, but a character actually called Reign, which I would have known if I were more of a DC nerd.

(8) Especially as this series is set in the Prime Timeline.

(9) Grandfather, rather than father.

(10) Even if not like this, there is no excuse for the title card for Ready Player One not looking like an arcade game ready screen.

Genderless: Girly Robots and Geek Backlash

Girl robots. Confusing, apparently.

Back in my childhood, The Transformers: The Movie introduced something new and a bit baffling to the Transformers universe. Not that double definite article, although that was a head scratcher, but Arcee, the first (I think, more or less, anyway) female Transformer.

Why should that be confusing? Well, I suspect that it's closely related to the reason why the new Doctor is such a hot button topic for many people. The Transformers, like the Time Lords, are alien beings, and many would argue that they are, effectively, genderless. The thing is, by 'genderless', they – perhaps unconsciously – mean 'all dudes.' I suspect that many of these critics are legitimately weirded out by the fact that suddenly the Transformers are split between boy robots and girl robots(1), but the reason that a female transformer brings this to the fore is that they – that we – had been, consciously or not, screening out the fact that every other Transformer was coded male. Even if we never heard them speak with a male voice they had traditionally masculine proportions – broad chest(2), narrow hips, big arms – if they were largely humanoid, and were universally referred to as 'he' within the narrative.

 

"We're going with pink then?"

It's confusing, people argued, because robots don't have sex. Well, probably not; it's essentially a kids' toy line we're talking about. It's certainly true that, wrecking ball scrota aside, Transformers are as sexless as a Ken doll, but that doesn't mean that they don't have gender. They do, and almost all of them are coded male (12 in 13 in the current Unified Continuity, I believe, reflecting that only one of the 13 Primes was female(3),) both in voice acting and in their physical and character design. What people usually mean by arguing that the originals don't have gender is that, as long as all of the Transformers on screen are coded male, we can kid ourselves that actually no, they're genderless. We just use he for convenience; Optimus Prime isn't a dude(4), honest. As soon as one of them demonstrably isn't a dude, however, all of the others are. A distinction appears on screen and now you can't deny it; they're all dudes, except her.

Strongarm. Not pink.

The other problem in Transformers, of course, is that the original female Autobot was Arcee, who was pink and very, very girly, and basically killed any chance of increasing female representation in the franchise for the next ten years, before Blackarachnia and Airazor made their debuts in Beast Wars. She made a brief appearance in Revenge of the Fallen, in which she was unceremoniously killed off. Outside of the live action movies, female Transformers are becoming more prevalent (at least 1 in 13) and less... femme. Arcee returned in Transformers: Prime as a two-wheeled badass with a heart of gold under a forbidding frown and a crisp, dark blue paint job. She wasn't in the follow up, Robots in Disguise, but that had Strongarm, a tough and eager, if somewhat by the book, cadet with a much more conventional Autobot frame, including four wheels, angular body panels and those narrow, gunfighter hips, and just a hint of lippy (and a female voice actor) to code her as feminine. The nature of representation is, however, a completely different topic, for another time, perhaps.

The dissonance caused by the sudden presence of a female exemplar in a formerly all-male world doesn't just annoy your actual, card-carrying chauvinists. It also means that those fans who self-identify as liberal feminists while they nestle snuggly into their male-dominated media are suddenly confronted with the fact that, as much as they may not be active sexists, they live in a world filled with passive, institutionalised sexism. People deal badly with discovering that something they love is riddled with ingrained prejudice, and pointing it out to them – whether actively or as a side-effect of casting against that prejudice – tends to get a defensive reaction. In the former case, they will often angrily defend the intentions of the creators, which is all well and good, but good intentions only go so far. The latter is viewed as a betrayal, because the beloved itself is telling them that it was sexist before.

It's a manifestation of the backlash effect, of course. "If we cast a woman as the Doctor now, then all the times we didn't might have been - gasp - sexist. Well, I'm not going to stand by and hear Doctor Who derided as sexist! If the other Doctors were men, that must have been right and proper, because that means Doctor Who was never sexist." (And then there are your card-carrying douchebags, but what can you ever do about them except proper education funding?)

I mean, does this look like someone with two hearts to you?

Female Transformers still mess with people's heads, and the female Doctor raises the same issue in people's minds, with some arguing that making the Doctor female is wrong because the Doctor is an alien and has no gender. The same argument is advanced whenever someone suggests casting a person of colour in the role of the Doctor. It's political correctness gonne madde! The Doctor isn't a white man, he's an alien, so why do you have to drag race/gender into it? If the Doctor is black, they argue, you're corrupting the alien purity of the character with a racial agenda. They argue thusly because black is a race. Likewise, if the Doctor is female, then the Doctor has gender, because female is a gender. White and male on the other hand are not a gender or a race; they're a default. This is, of course, why it is important to cast a woman as the Doctor, or a person of colour(5), because unless it is challenged then white and male will continue to be viewed as the neutral setting, and they just aren't. I for one am glad to see Doctor Who finally stepping up on this.

They're also dark skinned, by the way.
I couldn't find this image attributed; if you can point me to the artist, I will
acknowledge.

It's this perception that makes the Imperial Radch series so interesting. The Radch is an ungendered society, not differentiating at all between male and female. Citizens of the Radch are somewhat androgynous, but also do not code for gender cues, so that they struggle to recognise gender even in outsiders. In the text of the novels, this is represented by using female pronouns for all characters, save for a few instances in the first novel in which Breq, the narrator-protagonist, has to communicate with non-Radch in a gendered language(6). The impact of shifting the default setting is profound, not least in that it barely affects the narrative, but provokes the reader to examine their own expectations. It makes no difference to the story if any given character is male or female, but you catch yourself assuming they are all women until you realise that is... if not impossible, given the setting, then at least unlikely.

A similar effect can be excited in white readers by any novel in which black is considered the default, and only white characters are referred to by race. (White) authors Neil Gaiman and Ben Aaronovich both use this deliberately, in Anansi Boys and the Rivers of London series respectively. It's always a bit of an eye opener when your brain parses the dissonance of someone actually being described as a white man, instead of just a man. To my considerable shame, I don't think I've read enough black literature to know how prevalent this is there; I'm taking steps in that direction as part of this year's reading challenge, because there's no worth in identifying a lack and allowing it to continue.

You know you'e reaching when Michelle Yeoh isn't tough enough for you.

For further proof of the blinkered insistence in white male normalcy, one need look little further than the reaction to the early trailers for Star Trek: Discovery, which angrily denounced the idea of putting a woman in charge of a starship, let alone giving one the lead in a Star Trek series, and never mind a Chinese woman! Do these showrunners not understand Star Trek? Do they think that Gene Roddenberry created the original series in order to show women and non-white characters fully integrated into a multiracial, egalitarian society(7)? Honestly, I suspect that the only reason we don't have record of a similar outrage over the casting of Avery Brooks as Ben Sisko is that DS9 came out shortly before the internet exploded, so he was an established fact by the time a critical mass of aggrieved white men had access to proper forums.

I hope that the new Doctor will challenge the concept of genderless. She shouldn't be the female Doctor, or even 'the Doctor as female' particularly. She should simply be the Doctor, and like any other Doctor 90% of her lines should work for any other Doctor with minimal rewriting(9). If her personality has feminine affects, they should not be in any form so tangible as to be easily describable. She shouldn't be markedly more empathic and nurturing, at least not outside the usual bounds of regenerative variation. She should be compassionate, as the Doctor always should. Even the 12^th Doctor, who has been broadly characterised as an insensitive ass, is compassionate. She definitely shouldn't be getting into a relationship with a companion, male or female, any more than her predecessors did (and less than some of the more recent ones,) and the same definitely goes for crashing the TARDIS(10).

I suppose what I really want the show to prove over the next few seasons is that in the last 12-14(11) regenerations the Doctor was truly not defined by his gender, by not defining the new Doctor by hers.

No regeneration posters with 13 yet, given that she doesn't have a look, so let's finish with some ponies.

(1) And what is the purpose of sexual dimorphism, indeed of sex, in robots? Don't ask, and definitely don't Google.

(2) Optimus Prime's truck windscreen has always turned into his pecks.

(3) The one who died of a tragic love story, incidentally. They're trying, but with mixed results. In fairness, she was also the weaponsmith of the 13.

(4) I love Optimus, but he is so a dude.

(5) Full disclosure, I am still committed to British, but I'm trying to escape that.

(6) Which incidentally means that the only major character whose assigned biological sex is known is Breq's defrosting ice queen sidekick; who is male.

(7) I'll be the first(8) to admit that Roddenberry was often hamfisted and misguided in his attempts to depict his post-scarcity, post-prejudice utopia, but he certain wasn't deliberately creating white man adventures in space. It just... came out that way sometimes.

(8) Okay, I won't, because this subject is waay old and loads of people have already done it.

(9) When Colin Baker took over from Jon Pertwee in The Ultimate Adventure, they basically changed one 'polarity of the neutron flow' and made a fight scene less aikido-y.

(9) Although, fair play, I've played LEGO Dimensions and I've stacked the TARDIS into just about anything and everything in the world.

(10) YMMV.

Marvel Needs Women

The MCU's Black Widow is awesome, but she is
also one of only two core Phase 1 Avengers not to get
her own movie, and has notably different hair in each
appearance, where the boys seem fine with an iconic
do*. (Poster for The Avengers, (c) Marvel Studios)

It is not infrequently noted that it is a crying shame that the cinematic juggernaut that is the MCU doesn't have more female headliners, and just as common for such rejoinders to be offered as: "But it's got Black Widow," or "The Captain Marvel movie is in the works," or "Jane Porter is a strong female character, even if she doesn't do much fighting," and all of these are true, but it is still the case that there has yet to be a female headliner. As awesome as many of them are, all of Marvel's female characters to date are supporting roles. The most common response when the absence of female characters in any given film is mentioned is 'but this film is about [male character X], and you can't hold this movie responsible for the general dearth of female leads in Hollywood'. This is, as far as it goes, true, but the thing about the MCU is that it isn't just one film, it's twelve films, with another ten already scheduled for Phase 3, and three ongoing TV series with four more in the works (and in fairness, two of those - Agent Carter and Jessica Jones have female leads,) plus one shots, tie-ins and a colossal presence in the cultural zeitgeist.

This (plus their own chequered history) is why is is incumbent on Marvel to take a lead here. Received wisdom is that a female lead won't sell a comic book movie, but the MCU has sold The Guardians of the Galaxy, and Ant-Man, and if you can do that, you can certainly shift product on a Black Widow movie. As noted above, there is one extant series and one incoming with female leads, but the big screen is still the big screen, and the MCU doesn't have the excuse that this is one movie that happens to be about a dude. When you plan your movies four years and ten pictures in advance, you can make some serious, game-changing choices. Ant-Man is a film about fathers, which is why Hope van Dyne doesn't get to be the Wasp until the - if you'll pardon me - stinger**, but while the film on its own weathers that decision, as part of the MCU it is much less forgivable not to have brought the character to the foreground.

I mean, don't get me wrong; I respect the progress represented by having a
woman teach a man to fight and not have him end up better than her, I just
think they could be going further. (Still from Ant-Man, 2015, (c) Marvel
Studios)

And ultimately that's where Marvel is falling down. They have the characters, they're just keeping them in the background, and even when they get to do awesome it is in support of someone else and with that someone's name on the marquee. Pepper Potts supports Iron Man, Jane supports Thor, and Black Widow is the eternal second stringer. Peggy Carter is Cap's best gal. Darcy had to be saved by her intern's intern in The Dark World. Hope fits into that same mould; by being the support to her father and trainer to Scott Lang, she is a strong character who is held back from taking the lead. On the plus side, she never really needs to be rescued.

But where are the true leading ladies, the heroines at the point of the spear? Well, we have Agent Peggy Carter, who is awesome in late 40s chic, and the forthcoming Jessica Jones (which may in fact feature an honest to gosh superhero, Luke Cage, in a supporting role prior to his own series.) We have Melinda May and Bobbi Morse as the top combatants in Agents of SHIELD, and even Skye is marginally more tolerable as Daisy, but it's still Coulson's show and part of why I dislike Lance Hunter is as the living embodiment of the need to put a white man of action somewhere front and centre***. And of course the Widow. Add in Sif from the Thor movies and that's a fine ensemble for movie - or movies - of their own. Yet we have nothing on the cards until Captain Marvel in 2018.

Okay, if we want to do this right we might want to talk about
the outfit... (Image from Marvel.com, (c) Marvel)

I guess part of this comes from the source material; there are far fewer a-list female superheroes than male (Marvel.com's 'Women of Marvel' page categorises all of seven iconic female characters****,) and in particular most of Marvel's options are mutants, belonging to the forbidden X-Men franchise (not that that stopped them with Scarlet Witch and Quicksilver*****.) It can not be said that the MCU doesn't take chances, however, (Ant-Man, Guardians) and it's hard to accept that, say, a movie featuring the mutant Firestar would be that much tougher to sell than one about a gang of competent misfits including a foul-mouthed raccoon and a walking tree. Not only that, but the MCU has had a marked influence on the comics it sprang from, so more women headlining the movies could translate into more women headlining comics: Win!

From the perspective of Marvel, there is an even bigger reason to push forward a female headliner: As it stands, DC are going to beat them to it with Wonder Woman. Aside from the fact that DC has never been a bastion of feminist sensibility, Wonder Woman is also a notoriously troubled solo property; hugely influential and wildly successful as part of the various incarnations of the Justice League, but she hasn't had a successful live-action screen outing since Linda Carter hung up her satin tights, which is pretty much as if Batman had been a no-show since Adam West. Maybe Marvel would like to see Wonder Woman fail, but it would make it that much harder to make any other female-led comic book movie, given the tunnel vision for which studio executives are famed. Either way, win or lose, Wonder Woman will be highly influential on the future of the MCU, whether as a win for DC or a loss for superhero movies as a whole. One might have thought that Marvel would want to get out in front of that.

The 'bad present' contingent in Days of Future Past are trying a little harder
(which is more than can be said for Iceman's beard,) but then we remember
that Wolverine (the ultimate manly superhero) was given the starring role
originally taken by reader-liaison everygirl Kitty Pride. (Post for X-Men:
Days of Future Past, (c) 20th Century Fox

Perhaps most compellingly of all, I contend that the MCU should have more female characters, and black characters, and queer characters, because they can. Because now is the time when the studio has the potential to bring it home, and make the continuity that was spawned by metaphors for exclusion and prejudice a place to take a stand for equality again, instead of pandering for the bottom line. It's all well and good saying that the X-Men represent all minorities, but it doesn't really make up for the fact that in the otherwise excellent First Class the black guy died and the Latina turned evil.

Obviously, X-Men and the Sony Spider-Man movies are their own thing unconnected to the MCU, and I don't mean to go into them here except to say not falling, but doing motherfuckers******!

And that's what I want to see in the MCU - female characters, not falling, but doing; not helping, but leading; neither hogging the limelight from the male characters, nor shrinking from it, but participating and contributing as full equals. There are ten movies planned in Phase 3; one has a female headliner. It should be more, and I sincerely hope that by 2019 it is.

* And then there's the whole 'infertile = monster' thing in Age of Ultron, which I think is largely a result of conflating a couple of unrelated points due to lack of screen time, but is still problematic.
** I know some people are sad that Cassie Lang is too young to be brought in as Stature for at least a decade, but that's more of a nerd discussion.
*** The race thing is a whole separate issue, but again we've got lots of supporting non-whites and the likes of Luke Cage and Black Panther coming up to play lead. shame about Spider-Man.
**** Black Widow, Captain Marvel, Medusa, Ms Marvel, Scarlet Witch, She-Hulk and Storm (http://marvel.com/characters/list/996/women_of_marvel). Take that Invisible Woman! For comparison, there are 10 'top heroes', two of whom are Black Widow and Captain Marvel.
***** Because the twins are also part of the Avengers franchise in the comic continuity.
****** Seriously; I wrote that post just over a year ago and the idea of an Ant-Man movie was laughable then.

Mockingjay and the Rise of Part 3.1

I saw Mockingjay Part 1 a couple of weeks ago and forgot to blog it, so mostly what I have to say about it is that yeah, I enjoyed it in a pretty grim way. It's also weirdly enthralling to see Philip Seymour Hoffman still appearing in new films, and a little distracting.

Catching Fire was a bit of an odd fish; not quite new, not quite the same again, it struggled as a movie in its own right and I think that, without the promise of Mockingjay to come it would have on balance been a failure. Mockingjay Part 1 has its own problems, in particular the '3.1' issue I'm going to talk about below, but overall is a powerful and effective film. It's a lot less intimate than The Hunger Games, which had the time to introduce us to all the children who were about to die, and in some ways loses some of its punch by graduating its protagonists to professional soldiers. Its depictions of the hell of war are still punchy, however, and its refusal to allow any 'clean' victory is a solid decision.

It's main stumbling block is the recent phenomenon of dividing the final adaptation of a trilogy (or more; it really began with Harry Potter) into two films. The rationale for this is, I am sure, largely commercial; after all, The Deathly Hallows was actually a shorter book than, say, Order of the Pheonix. The purpose of part 3.1 is to get one more year of surefire box office returns before moving on to the next project, regardless of the artistic impact.

Said impact is palpable, resulting in films that retain far more of the detail, nuance and - for better or worse - pacing of the source material. It makes, overall, for more faithful adaptations (although see also The Hobbit,) but that is not intrinsically a good thing. Films and books are very different beasts, and treating them as such can result in very tedious adaptations. As much as I love The Hobbit, the opening narration of the first film - while very true to the book - could have stood to be reduced some for the sake of pace and energy.

I think 'energy' is the key thing; what makes a book crackle is not the same as what makes a film zip. Film is a visual medium, although it also uses sound, and while reading is usually done visually literature is actually more of an auditory experience. The words are key, and while we may provide the voices to go along with the pictures in our heads, the words that we hear those voices speak are fundamental to our understanding of the text. Film making is also a collaboration between the director, writer, actors and other crew members, whereas reading is a collaboration between the writer and the reader.

Books tend to go more slowly than films, partly because it takes longer to explain something than for it to happen, and partly because they have to in order for the reader to keep pace in the evolving world inside his or her head. A film ought not to be shot at the pace of a book; that would be a terrible mistake.

Notable instances of the phenomenon to date include Mockingjay and The Deathly Hallows, as well as Twilight: Breaking Dawn. The same is planned for Allegiant, the third part of the Divergent trilogy, although the director of The Maze Runner has spoken out against the idea for that franchise. The Hobbit was stretched from one book to three films, although that was because it was The Hobbit plus a bunch of material from the appendices of The Lord of the Rings adapting it into a true prequel to the Rings film trilogy.

Similarly, A Storm of Swords became two seasons of A Game of Thrones on TV (that's twenty hours for those marveling at The Hobbit's nine.) Of course, that was also often published as two separate books, and it wasn't until Season 4 brought in chunks of the next two books that the pace felt like it was dragging a little.

Of the film examples, The Deathly Hallows was arguably the most justified. There's a lot happening and a fairly natural break, such that neither film felt like it was marking time in a Matrix Reloaded stylee. For my money, Mockingjay holds up, at least as far as part 1, and the fact that everyone I know who went in having read the books pretty much knew where the break would be suggests that that too is a natural break. I've heard much bad about the extended Twilight finale, but then I move in circles where I hear bad things about Twilight more easily than good.

The danger is that, as with The Matrix and other two-part trilogies, Part 1 will become stodgy and slow, all set-up and no pay-off, while Part 2 will be dominated by a single over-stretched PJesque battle royale, and then try to wrap up too much all at once. So far, the 3.1/2s that I've seen have worked, but I can't say for sure that they wouldn't have worked just as well as a single film. I guess I can be more certain next year, after Mockingjay Part 2.

The Age of Ultron teaser has sold me... on the MCU Civil War

So, as I was a little slow in finding out, the official teaser trailer for Avengers 2 (in the UK... what? Avengers Reassemble?) is now online. I am going to talk about it and the whole 'MCU are doing Civil War' bit, so if you're avoiding all spoilers... well, I sort of blew it already mentioning Civil War didn't I, but definitely don't read further, and if you do then don't blame me.

Okay, so the obvious: That's some solid epic right there. Lots to intrigue and tantalise, from James Spader's nigh-seductive* Ultron voiceover to Hulkbuster suits and some hardcore emoting from Elizabeth Olsen, hinting that maybe the big teen contract went to the wrong sisters. And our favourites are all there, and apparently being served; Cap kicking in doors, Stark and his armour, Hulk and Black Widow having a moment, Hawkeye... in a forest; Thor dropping his hammer. There's a creepy version of an old Disney song.

And everyone is talking about that, so I want to focus on something this sold to me personally.

I've never being keen on the idea of Civil War; I'd not yet seen a speculative path from Iron Man 3 to a Civil War storyline that didn't basically involve Tony Stark performing a complete 180-heel turn or Pepper getting shoved in the fridge.

Now I see a path. After that trailer, I can see exactly how they can do this, and how it could really, really work.

It's been speculated that the Hulkbuster is not intended to bring down the Hulk, just slow him down so that he can be put on the naughty step if he kicks off (also that it's Ultron in the Hulkbuster, but it looked like Iron Man's helmet in there to me.) If that's the case, and especially if the suit was designed at Banner's request (look at him in the shot inside the jet, all curled up and woobie, and tell me he isn't having some control issues again,) then that's the first step on Stark's path to feeling that heroes need to be policed. Add in Quicksilver and Scarlet Witch running around with Ultron and the seeds of registration are there.

There's an army of quasi-Iron Man drones in the trailer, either forming Ultron's army or being crushed by... I'm not sure if it's an early version of his body or another drone or suit he's puppeting; puppetry being a pretty clear theme. Stark also talks about the end of the path that he started them on, and there are scenes of the Avengers raiding a kind of monastery and anonymous army types led by bearded Andy Serkis, so if the Avengers (perhaps in line with SHIELD Mk 2) have set themselves up as Earth's Hydra-hunters and it's going to go horribly wrong, that's another step towards Tony being more in favour of opening up and letting the government control things, as much so he doesn't have to as because he thinks that they should.

Finally, the broken shield. It's a corny bit (unless done very well) but it makes me suspect that Quicksilver and Scarlet With may be used to give a glimpse into a darkest timeline. If that were shown to Stark, it could again lead towards the Civil War.

The trailer for Avengers 2 definitely makes me want to see Avengers 2, but it has also taken me past a bump in the road that made me wonder if I'd still be watching MCU movies further along. Civil War is going to be rough, and that's right and proper, but I'm looking forward to seeing what they do with it.

*Description amended as more and more responses make it clear that the voiceover is in fact just plain seductive.

Why the success or failure of the Ghostbuster's reboot will not stand or fall on the gender of the leads

This poster has one of the better cast shots, which
is why I used one from the sequel.
Also, one of the men on this poster isn't on that cast
list. If it was the black guy people might make
assumptions!

Okay, so my title is a bit of a gimme:  the success or failure of the Ghostbuster's reboot will not stand or fall on the gender of the leads because claiming that casting women in the main roles is 'feminazing a classic' or 'gynocentric' are as much pathetically transparent misogynist strawmen as claiming that 'women aren't as funny as men'. It's also a little disingenuous, because casting women to lead Hollywood movies sets one up for the gauntlet of a production and marketing machine that sees male stars as the only bankable assets. Any film in the action or science fiction genres that doesn't cast a 'name' male lead is taking a gamble that the studio won't royally bollocks its advertising and bury it in a release dead zone so that they can blame their predicted poor turn out on overall low ticket sales, but I for one don't think that it's a gamble that it's wrong to take.

Also, this is not to say that the casting of the leads can't sink the film, just that it won't be because they're women. Casting the wrong women will kill a film as surely as casting the wrong men, but given that the script is unwritten, anyone claiming that casting a woman in purely hypothetical role X will ruin the movie since role X is clearly intended for a male actor (maybe that should be role Y?) is either the greatest prophet since Nostradamus* or talking out of their arse.

So, and working purely from my own NSHO, what are the factors on which Ghostbusters not-actually-3 will sink or swim?

To start with, what were the keys to the success of the original? To understand that, it helps to see that the film almost never happened at all; at least not the way it ended up.

Dan Ackroyd produced the first super-high concept version of the script as a vehicle for himself and John Belushi. Ivan Reitman saw the impracticality of the script and Ackroyd worked with Harold Ramis to ground the concept in the present day. The death of John Belushi led to Bill Murray being brought in, with Ramis - only an occasional actor - and Ackroyd as the scientific members of the Ghostbusters, and Ernie Hudson rounding out the crew as the straight man. Sigourney Weaver was the serious acting talent and Rick Moranis was annoying, but in a role that called for him to be so. The song 'Ghostbusters' was a sensation, despite not being very good on a musical level.

The result was almost a perfect storm of action, special effects and humour, making it hard to pin down why the film worked. There is no better illustration of this illusive quality than Ghostbusters II, which reunited the same team, but failed to please on the same level. Nevertheless, there was enough residual energy for The Real Ghostbusters to run another two years and Extreme Ghostbusters to... well, get made in the first place, and for people to feel a massively proprietorial affection for the original movie on its 30th anniversary**.

Perhaps the key lesson to learn from GII is that 'more of the same' is unlikely to cut it. A new Ghostbusters film is going to have to do something new. Nevertheless, its commercial success confirmed the affection for the original cast and characters. Obviously, the longed-for sequel with the original cast starring is never going to happen now, with the death of Harold Ramis, but if anything is to be done, the public - or at least vocal sections of it - will expect some serious cameos.

With that in mind, a hard reboot (as of 10/10/14 the confirmed direction for Paul Feig's female-led offering) is probably the thing most likely to kill the film. It's not definite, but it essentially squanders any nostalgic loyalty to the franchise and brings the commercial future of the movie down to the here and now.

Wow; when I say it like that it feels like a good thing, but the danger is that the association, once no longer a blessing, will become a bane. In addition to losing the resentful fans of the older film, there is an automatic skepticism of a remake/reboot to overcome. It's a shame, because done right the positive association with the original Ghostbusters would have been a good way to launch a female-led sequel with a boost to take it past Hollywood's usually gynophobia. As it is, there is every chance that the reboot factor will kill the film before a single frame hits the digital medium and idiots around the world will say: "See; we told you women weren't funny."

In an interview with Rolling Stone***, Feig said the following:

1. "My favorite thing to do is work with funny women. I was like, what if it was an all-female cast? If they were all women? Suddenly, my mind kind of exploded: that would be really fun,"
2. "I love the first one so much, I don't want to do anything to ruin the memory of that. So it just felt like, let's just restart it because then we can have new dynamics. I want the technology to be even cooler. I want it to be really scary, and I want it to happen in our world today that hasn't gone through it so it's like, oh my God what's going on?"

On the first point: On a high concept like Ghostbusters, I can't help but feel that this is a bad reason to fix on an all-female cast from the get-go. Maybe it will work, maybe it won't, but don't you want to see what's in the script first? Still, fuck it; if that's how you roll as a director maybe that's just what's going to bring out your best work, and if you're working with a writer you know writes those parts well (I'm not really familiar with Feig's collaborations with Katie Dippold, but clearly they feel they work well as a team) then go for it.

On the second... I don't think that anything in that want list couldn't be done with a 'new generation' sequel, except wanting the world to be a clean slate, and remember how I was saying of GII that it turns out more of the same isn't what people wanted then? I'm not convinced that it's what is wanted now. For fans of the old, it's a do-over of something that didn't need to be done over, and from the perspective of the project as a new film, relaunching just means that you're retreading old ground instead of making your own mark.

There exists a Ghostbusters film about the supernatural being forced into the public perception; there exists a Ghostbusters film about the world trying to deny it. Why not have this film be about a world that thinks it's ready for the next Gozer, the next Vigo? Hell, why not go balls to the wall and use the goodwill of a Ghostbusters project to make Ackroyd's original concept?

Ghostbusters hit the perfect combination of writing, cast and direction, in part from the combination of Bill Murray's improvisational performance and Ramis and Ackroyd's investment in their own script, which allows them to project Egon and Ray's total commitment to the high concepts of the movie which would otherwise seem laughable. The absence of anyone as utterly involved in the movie as Ackroyd was is likely to hurt the film, and the chances of pulling together an ensemble as great as the original line-up is slim, not because the female performers aren't out there - or, indeed, the male performers to pull off a reboot - but because the team-up in Ghostbusters was relatively untried, thus bringing in no preconceptions outside of Murray and Ackroyd's work on Saturday Night Live, and that it worked as well as it did a matter of ineffable alchemy. 

No producer can cast for the ineffable, as much as they might try. In other words, it is possible that such a cast could be pulled together for a rebooted Ghostbusters, but you couldn't do it a-purpose.

Ultimately, the film's success will depend on a multitude of factors, and its commercial and artistic success may vary wildly. For my money, the reboot is the greatest reason for skepticism, but I think that commercially that is going to end up shackled to an all female cast like an anvil.

* An attempt to do a prophet/profit pun fell down based on the fact that I don't know who posts obscene profits these days.
** I saw it at the cinema; I'm so old.
*** Rolling Stone online, http://www.rollingstone.com/movies/news/new-ghostbusters-film-will-be-series-reboot-20141009; get me, citing sources like some kind of professional.

Comic Book Adaptation - Not Falling, but Doing

Warning: This post is likely to contain a lot of spoilers.

Say what you like about the yellow spandex, at least you could tell who was
on which side.

"It wasn't like that in the comics" is a common enough rallying cry for the aggrieved geek community these days, but increasingly I start to ask myself if it isn't a good thing sometimes when an adaptation breaks away from the original text, especially in an original text as convoluted as a comic book continuity. After all, it isn't as if the comic books themselves haven't cleaned house from time to time, with either a universe shattering Crisis event or an outright reboot. It's needed too, with the two main continuities - DC and Marvel - each spanning dozens of titles and decades of publishing history, including a lot of highly contradictory, controversial, and on occasion just plain dumb stuff.

So, what change is okay when adapting a comic book for the screen? What change is too much change?

Here's my opinion: Any change is acceptable that is not to the detriment of the characters or story being told by the movie, and which does not alter the characters to the point that the adaptation is in name only.

Some examples:

Complaints about the X-Men franchise are legion: That Storm's claustrophobia was ignored; that Wolverine was too tall; that Magneto was too old. Spider-Man brought us the controversial organic webshooters (and the Amazing Spider-Man was criticised for making them mechanical again). Do these matter?

Well, Storm's claustrophobia, while an important part of the character's personality in the comics, is not intrinsic. The character in the film does just fine without it, and to throw that in would have been a) completely out of left-field for movie viewers, and b) rendered the character ineffectual at a key moment without any build-up. Wolverine's height is the definition of a non-issue, and Magneto's age an unavoidable consequence of the march of time. The nature of Spider-Man's webshooters really only matters in as much as it impacts on his character, although I prefer the mechanical, largely because the 'performance anxiety' jokes about them in Spider-Man II annoyed me.

On the other hand, there are changes that do matter, usually because they make the film or at least the character weaker.

A case in point is the removal of the Phoenix Force from the X-Men movies. I understand why it was done; it introduces a huge amount of backstory that is just too much for a single movie. Unfortunately, the consequence of removing it is that instead of Jean Grey being a woman fighting - with the assistance of her mentor - against the influence of an external force that wants to manipulate her powers for its own alien purposes, she becomes a woman unable to control her own strength without her (male) mentor performing psychic surgery on her without consent. This is not good for her character, and it is not good for Professor Xavier's character; she is made weak, he is made... well, pretty damned evil.

Strong women are the purpose of this post, or a strong woman at least, and a change that ought to have been made.

The Sam Raimi/Tobey Macguire Spider-Man trilogy gave us a Mary-Jane Watson who was feisty, but basically useless. In her place, The Amazing Spider-Man (and II) delivers Gwen Stacy, a brave, brilliant, strong-willed young woman, whose drive, intelligence and courage enable Spider-Man to defeat both the Lizard and Electro.

And then they killed her, because that's what Gwen Stacy does. Gwen Stacy falls, Spider-Man catches her, but she dies anyway. It's how her story ends, because it's how her story ended in 1973.

In this case, in my opinion at least, the film needed to be different from the book. Much of the tension of the films comes from Peter Parker's fears that associating with him will get Gwen hurt, and Gwen's determination that, with or without powers, she is capable of helping him and achieving something important in the world. Having presented Gwen as a strong, smart, competent woman, by reverting to the narrative of 1973 the film then tells its audience that the answer to this dilemma is that no, a woman - especially one without powers - can't be a hero, and that a lover is a burden Spider-Man can not afford to carry.

This is crap.

But what about Ant-Man?

It's 2014 and Marvel Studios have been showing for years with the MCU that you can reinvent your characters and setting in a cinematic form in just the same way, and at least as successfully (given the level of criticism leveled at much of the Ultimate universe and the New 52) as you can in comics. The MCU's Black Widow has yet to succumb to her often terminal early-onset chronic backstabbing disorder, so why must we accept the ugly, wholly-negative assertion that Gwen Stacy was doomed from the start?

Even if it were true that Gwen Stacy had to die - which it isn't - then I still have an issue with how it happened. This Gwen Stacy was brilliant, bold, proactive. She chose to be the one who broke things off with Peter rather than mope after him when he couldn't commit to her. She chose to pursue a bright educational future instead of staying where her ex was. She had conviction enough that Peter was willing to go with her and set an episode of the franchise in London.

Just take a moment to absorb that dialogue before you
decide that this is a sacred moment that has to happen.

And this woman, this incredible woman and amazing, positive role model, because of what someone wrote before I was born, died not doing, but falling. If she truly had to die, this Gwen Stacy deserved to go down swinging, if not defeating the Goblin then creating the opening which enabled Spider-Man to do so. Instead, she fell. From her crowning moment, when she not only helped Peter overcome a problem that had defeated him as a scientist, but then unhesitatingly sent a bajillion volts into Electro and trusted Peter to get out of the way, rather than agonising over how he might get hurt, to her ignominious death as a fridge-bound victim, took less than five minutes. Five minutes to tear down a wonderful, inspirational hero and make her into a damsel in distress.

It's lazy writing, it's against everything the film was building up (and not in a good, twist ending kind of way) and it was done from some misplaced devotion to the continuity of a forty year old comic. Yes, the death of Gwen Stacy was an iconic moment that possibly changed the course of comic book history, but it's not a fixed point that has to happen to every Gwen Stacy, and it should not have happened to this Gwen Stacy; not like that.

Pretty Woman

Once upon a time there was a little script who wanted to be a serious drama. The little script was the script for a dark drama about the ugly nature of the sex industry; about (roughly) a drug-addicted prostitute hired to act as escort for a rich man in order to make enough money to go to Disneyland and ultimately ejected from his life when she proved unable to stay clean.

The little script tried to get produced as a hard-hitting major motion picture, but all the studios said "No."

Then the script's fairy godfather said; "Don't worry, little script; you shall go to the production green light ball!" And he waved his wand and removed the gritty commentary and the female lead's drug habit and replaced them with a flutter of shimmering dialogue and a whimsical, upbeat ending.

And lo, the little script became the most successful romantic comedy of all time, and they all lived happily ever after.

Pretty Woman is a film that I saw for the first time yesterday, a mere twenty four years after it came out. It's a bubbly, lighthearted romcom; an artfully made feelgood movie, with superb performances and a typically 80s (although it actually came out in 1990) attention to its soundtrack album potential. It is a highly-enjoyable modern fairy tale, provided you are able to ignore a number of basic and unpleasant facets of the sex trade while you're watching it.

Is it a good film? Yes. Is it uncontroversial? Hell no. As a depiction of prostitution it sucks and it hits about as hard as a sponge, but ultimately it is a lot more fun - and was far more commercially successful - than the original concept would have been and it's sort of pointless to compare the two (he says, during a comparison of the two). The original script (working title, $3000) would never have attracted studio backing; it would have lacked the gloss of the actual product, and probably ended up in the same milieu (and with much the same takings) as the no-frills Ken Russel film Whore which came out a year later (and which I have not seen).

As it is, Pretty Woman is ultimately a flawed product, and some police sources in the 90s blamed it for a rise in prostitution in the same way that The Nun's Story bolstered recruitment in the convents. On the other hand, people blamed Fargo when someone froze to death in Minnesota, and that turned out to be nonsense, so press statistics are important. It's not a complex film, and it ducks many of the issues, but then again it's a fairy story, and by that measure it makes some attempt to convey a message about prostitution, but overall focuses on being a well-made romantic comedy fairytale.

And the message is 'marry Richard Gere and get off the streets', of course, which lacks general application, but it's something.