Where has the time gone…?

Friday, February 26th.

The last Friday of February and, in a few days, we’re into March.

Third month of the year and one year since the U.S. truly understood COVID-19 was here. Mind you, it was here already.

As I’ve mentioned before, my Father tested positive for COVID anti-bodies and the last time he was sick -and he was quite sick for a little bit of time but thankfully not so sick he needed hospitalization- was last year late January early February.

I’m quite sure he -and quite possibly several other people in our sphere, including myself- caught COVID back then and simply didn’t realize it.

Moving to today, we have reached the point where some 50 million people have gotten vaccines for COVID here in the U.S. Today the FDA is meeting to see if they will approve the Johnson & Johnson vaccine, which requires only one shot.

If its greenlit today, we’ll have three vaccines available in the U.S., Pfizer and Moderna and now the Johnson & Johnson.

Because the J & J vaccine only requires one shot and doesn’t need the extreme cold storage, that could be a big game changer and allow many more people to get their vaccine.

Hopefully we’ll hear the good news a little later today.

Oh, and everyone out there: Have a great weekend! Stay safe!

Stan Lee, Redux

A few days back I posted (you can read it here) about the biographical novel True Believer: The Rise and Fall of Stan Lee by Abraham Reisman, which was released and has been promoted quite a bit.

This biography has opened up some old debates on just how much Stan Lee did with regard to the books/characters released through Marvel Comics and which have become these days a multi-billion dollar mega-juggernaut what with the success of the various Marvel movies… all of which, until Stan Lee’s passing, featuring amusing cameo appearances by him.

Roy Thomas, a Stan Lee protege who started working at a very young age at Marvel in 1965, was there for a little over half of Stan Lee’s tenure as editor/writer of the material (he left the position in 1972) pushes back against the biography and some of its conclusions. He argues the biography is a little too quick to take the word of Jack Kirby over Stan Lee and diminishes his work there. You can read the article for yourself at this link to thehollywoodreporter.com and is written by Mr. Thomas himself:

Roy Thomas, Former Marvel Editor, Pushes Back on New Stan Lee Biography

In my last posting, I noted that many years have now passed since that epoch, which lasted a little less than 10 years in total, basically from 1960 to roughly 1970.

Further, over the years since that point it was clear that memories were hazy, not just for Stan Lee, but for Jack Kirby as well, something that Mr. Thomas notes when stating the biography seems to come down harder on Mr. Lee’s fuzzy memory versus Jack Kirby’s.

If true (I haven’t read the book), that’s a fair point to make.

Further, Mr. Thomas does provide some solid written proof in the form of a couple of early plot drafts by Stan Lee which survive to this day and do indeed suggest/prove he did have a hand in plotting the first, and another earlier, Fantastic Four story.

Mr. Thomas provides this fascinating bit, taken from that column (I highlighted the part I thought was the most fascinating):

That Stan Lee was the co-creator, and not the sole creator, of the key Marvel heroes from the Fantastic Four and Spider-Man through Daredevil and the Silver Surfer can hardly be in dispute at this late stage. I myself, back in the ’80s when I wasn’t working for him, had a friendly argument with him on that score over lunch. I soon realized that, as much as he respected the talents and contributions of artists (Riesman would say “artist/writers” and he’s right, at least in one sense) such as Jack Kirby and Steve Ditko to the characters introduced in the 1960s, he could never really bring himself, in his own mind, to think of them as “co-creators.” The two of us had to agree to disagree, and I never saw any use in bringing it up again.

This, to me, is the crux of the argument many have with/against Stan Lee: He took credit for the “creation” of all these characters and one can’t help but wonder how much he subsequently felt he was the sole writer of the stories as well.

I don’t doubt that in the early going of Marvel Comics Stan Lee had a much more involved hand in writing/plotting the stories. There may well be several stories, including some of the earliest ones, that Stan Lee had a big hand on.

But based on the voluminous photocopies of pages released in more recent times, one gets the feeling that Jack Kirby at least and perhaps a little later on, was doing most of the actual story plotting via drawing the actual pages and putting notes on the sides as to what’s going on. Stan Lee would then write in his dialogue/captions (and, to be extremely fair, they were often dynamite!) but to say that Stan Lee was the “sole” creator of these works, especially after the first few years, feels like taking a glory that wasn’t entirely his.

Interestingly, Mark Evanier, who one could look at as a protege of Jack Kirby (he was around/working with him following his leaving Marvel Comics), was interviewed for the biography but had no opinion about it because he hadn’t read it yet. Nonetheless, he had this to say about the Stan Lee/Jack Kirby creative relationship (the full post which I took this excerpt from can be found on his website, News From ME – Mark Evanier’s blog):

But my conclusion is that the comics we know to be created by Stan Lee and Jack Kirby were created by Stan Lee and Jack Kirby, not necessarily as 50-50 efforts and certainly not with Jack supplying only the visuals. I think Jack did a lot more than Stan — at least on the pages — and until fairly recently, got a lot less credit; likewise, Stan and Steve Ditko, Stan and Don Heck, Stan and Bill Everett, etc. The disparity in financial reward was even greater.

But that doesn’t mean Stan did nothing or did nothing well. I have witnessed way too many Stan/Jack debates in my life and I think all are dead wrong if they lead to the conclusion that either contributed zero. This view has occasionally made me feel unwelcome on Stan Lee forums and in Jack Kirby chat groups. And just as I reject that notion, I reject the argument that neither would have amounted to anything post-1961 without the other. They were two men of extraordinary skills…just not the same skills.

A lot of folks don’t want to hear about the battles and the quarrels and the screwings. They just want to enjoy the body of work…and I sometimes wish I could stop there. Instead, I think I’ll stop here…for now.

Perhaps that’s the best summary of these extraordinary men and their extraordinary place in entertainment history.

First color photograph of a car…?

Articles like the one I’m about to link below absolutely fascinate me.

Presented on jalopnik.com and written by Jason Torchinsky, he believes he has found…

The very first color photograph of a car

I’ll spoil the article a bit but I think Mr. Torchinsky is probably right.

This is assuming, as he does, no other photographs are found from before that time taken by the same gentleman (I don’t want to SPOIL the whole article, but the person who took the photograph is indeed one of the giants of that sort of stuff).

One more SPOILER, the photograph in question. From way back in 1906…

Absolutely fascinating stuff!

Frantic days…

How does the saying go?

If it weren’t for bad luck, I’d have no luck at all.

My wife’s last week, in a nutshell.

On Thursday, February 11, my eldest daughter and she flew off to Austin, Texas. She was simply accompanying my daughter back to her home after spending a good deal of time here with us and, we hoped, well after any COVID-19 craziness with the traveling during Christman/New Years.

The flight there was fine. My wife, who has already gotten both Pfizer vaccines, accompanied her on the flight, got to Austin, and all was fine.

The trip was meant to be very brief. She would fly back home on Monday, February 15. One week ago today.

Mother nature, alas, had other plans.

For those who’ve been in a cave the last week, an icy blast hit the middle of the country starting on Sunday February the 14th. Snow fell, the roads iced up, and Texas was quickly exposed as a state that, thanks to deregulation, had an electric grid that simply wasn’t up to the chill.

Worse, for many water pipes froze and burst and roads were undriveable. Austin -and it seems the entirety of Texas as well- doesn’t have a good snow clearing and/or salting system. As someone who lived in Canada, what I saw on the news and heard from my wife about the situation there was something which would not have caused a problem for people in my (very) old stomping grounds.

But in Texas, it proved paralyzing.

The flight scheduled for Monday was cancelled. She rescheduled for Wednesday but, as the situation played out, it was clear Wednesday wouldn’t work either. The roads remained incredibly dangerous to drive on -there was absolutely no chance they would risk driving to the airport and even the Super Shuttle service was not going- but it didn’t matter: The airports were essentially closed and all flights were cancelled.

Thursday, we hoped, she would finally be able to travel home but the weather reports were grim, along with the general news. People were losing their power and water and the weather was bitterly cold.

Anticipating losing water, they collected snow in my daughter’s bathtub to use for the toilet. Eventually, their water was turned off.

But Thursday the 18th, the third scheduled day for my wife to fly back, was cancelled out and, while outside getting more snow for the bathtub, my wife slipped on some ice, fell, and broke her arm in two places.

Yeah.

Luckily, by Thursday the roads were better to drive on versus even the day before, and my daughter and wife were able to go to an emergency clinic. My wife thought maybe she didn’t break her arm but an X-Ray quickly proved she had. Luckily, again, she didn’t break her wrist but a little below it, which meant she likely didn’t need surgery.

A temporary cast was made to keep her arm stable but a more permanent cast couldn’t be put on until the swelling went down, three or four days later.

By this point, my wife had her flight scheduled, for the fourth time, for Saturday the 20th.

By then the cold snap was in the process of going away and the flight took off on time and she arrived home a little early, though it was quite late at night when we finally got her home.

We spent Sunday relaxing as best we could and, this morning, headed to a Hospital which had an Orthopedics department and were able to see us.

She got herself another set of X-Rays and -finally, good news!- the break was relatively stable and didn’t require any surgery.

In a little over one hour, she was back outside ready for me to pick her up, sporting a nice blue cast over her right arm.

Meanwhile in Austin, my daughter’s water was back Sunday night and its looking like things are somewhat getting back to normal in that beautiful city. Better yet, she was able to gas up her car today (she was getting very low) and it looks like some of the grocery stores are filling up with foods.

Meanwhile, horror stories about Texas are still coming in, from the incredibly inept Governor and Senator Ted Cruz’s idiotic attempt to flee the state for Cancun. There are heartbreaking stories of people who froze to death, including an 11 year old boy, and one can’t help but shake one’s head at all of this.

In light of these tragedies, my wife breaking her arm and my daughter’s inconvenience is a small thing indeed versus the suffering others have faced.

It shouldn’t have happened yet it did.

I really, really hope that the voters of Texas remember this the next time elections roll around.

Perseverance…

Yesterday came the excellent news (for once, right?) that the Perseverance rover  had successfully landed on Mars. There were two images almost immediately released, the first one of the surface it landed upon…

The first image captured by NASA's Perseverance rover of the surface of Mars after its successful landing on Thursday, Feb. 18, 2021.

And the next one was an incredible look at the rover taken by its jetpack as it was being lowered to the surface of Mars…

This shot from a camera on Perservance's "jetpack" captures the rover in midair, just before its wheels touched down.

Whew.

Well, the Perseverance rover is down safe and sound and looks like there was no damage to the mechanical device.

What will follow will surely be incredible.

Compared to other rovers that have landed on Mars, this one has some very impressive technology within. We’re going to get HD images for the first time and… sound. Not only that, the rover has a detachable helicopter-like device which will fly around and Mars, also taking what are sure to be incredible images of the planet’s surface.

As if that weren’t enough, the rover will collect samples and check to see if there are indeed any living creatures in the soil.

Want more information on what’s to come? Check out this fascinating article by George Dvorsky and presented on gizmodo.com…

Here’s What’s Next for Perseverance Rover’s Journey on Mars

It’s going to be a fascinating next few months and years!

Texas…

How the hell does this happen?

How the hell does a state as big and robust as Texas essentially go down for the count because of a winter system?

I’m in a rather unique position, on the outside looking in but on the inside my wife and daughter are there, “enjoying” the situation right this moment. They’ve been lucky. Their electricity hasn’t gone out yet, but as of yesterday their water was turned off.

In-freaking-credible.

They dare not go out to stores since Monday (not that many of them were open) but yesterday they did and later on, when I talked to my wife, she said it was scary driving along the road to a nearby supermarket to get some much needed provisions given they had to drive along some hilly terrain and feared their car would slide on the ice in the road.

This is the city of Austin, a beautiful, wonderful city, but like almost all the rest of Texas, they’ve been gripped by the incompetence of years of deregulation. They also don’t have, it appears, any snow shoveling trucks or other equipment to deal with a winter storm of this magnitude.

It’s amusing -to the point of volcanically infuriating– that governor Gregg Abbott has the cojones to state -on Fox “News”, natch- that somehow the electrical problems were caused by those Green Deal initiatives, including Turbines. Or that Rick Perry, one time governor, stated that… hell, its in the title of the below article, which also presents Mr. Abbott’s head spinning stupidity about Green energy (the article below is by Katie Shepherd and presented on washingtonpost.com):

Rick Perry says Texans would accept even longer power outages ‘to keep the federal government out of their business’

Never mind, Mr. Abbott, that countries with far harsher winters have turbines that work perfectly fine. Never mind that freaking Antarctica has functioning turbines. Oh no, they simply don’t work in winter weather, right?

Except…

The wind turbines account for some 10% of Texas’ total power grid. The failure is across the board, from fossil fuel to nuclear.

And the reason for this major failure?

Deregulation.

Seems Texas has their very own power grid and they don’t want no bothersome federal regulations intruding on their profits.

You know, the regulations that would have mandated protections to the grids in case of things like… oh… severe winter weather.

This is why wind turbines in places like Antarctica and Norway function despite winter weather which is much more severe and long lasting than that found this week in Texas. Their equipment is winterized while Texas’ equipment is obviously not.

But, hey, it works well on the right wing propaganda sites to blame people like AOC and Bernie Sanders -people who have absolutely zero to do with Texas- for the problems some 20 years of Republican rule have created, right?

Oh, and of course in the middle of all this and not to be outdone, Ted Cruz shows he’s willing to lower the bar even more for Texan Republicans (the below article is by D. Roche and presented on Newsweek.com)…

Ted Cruz accused of flying to Cancun amid Texas outages as photo goes viral

The photo:

Image

Yup, sure does look like our good “friend” Ted Cruz aboard an aircraft heading to Cancun for a pleasant vacation while some of his constituents are quite literally freezing and/or starving to death.

Sheesh.

I really, really hope the people of Texas remember this when elections next come up.

POSTSCRIPT: My daughter in Austin just sent me this. Sounds right!

Rush Limbaugh…

The two Golden Age of Hollywood superstars Bette Davis and Joan Crawford had what could be described -in the nicest way possible-a contentious relationship.

Joan Crawford, left, and Bette Davis, right, in Whatever Happened To Baby Jane

Putting it more bluntly, they were bitter rivals who spent a lifetime going after and trying to one-up each other. Incredibly, they even managed to make one film together, the cult classic horror film Whatever Happened To Baby Jane? , made in the later parts of their respective careers, but even that didn’t bring them any closer.

When Joan Crawford died in 1977, Bette David had this to say about her passing:

You should never say bad things about the dead, only good . . . Joan Crawford is dead. Good.

Love the art, part deux…

Yesterday I wrote about Joss Whedon -among others- who are well known creative individuals who are reckoning with some pretty negative stories regarding how they are as individuals. (You can read that post here)

With regard to Mr. Whedon, the negative stories, rumors of which were around for years but the flood of stories seem to have been breached in the last couple of years, may make fans of his work, including Buffy The Vampire Slayer, Angel, The Avengers, etc., rethink their feelings for the artist, if not the art they produced.

Over on Salon.com, there is an excerpt from the novel True Believer: The Rise and Fall of Stan Lee by Abraham Reisman.

Before I offer a link to the excerpt, let me say the following: Most people today view Mr. Stan Lee in very glowing terms.

Image result for stan lee

In recent years and before his passing in 2018 and thanks to a series of cameos in the Marvel movies, among others, he became the genial grandfather, the kindly face of the Marvel Age of Comics, of which he was one of the big movers and shakers of the company since its first big successes in 1961 with the release of The Fantastic Four and in 1962 with the release of Spider-Man.

In both cases, Stan Lee was listed as the writer of these -and a lot of other!- Marvel books.

In reality, there has existed for many years curiosity as to how much Stan Lee actually did with the individual comic books he was reported to have written.

Image result for jack kirby

The above individual is Jack Kirby. His name may not be as well known as Stan Lee, at least among those not as familiar with the comic books which became the basis for the spectacularly successful Marvel films, but it should be.

Jack Kirby (1914-1994) was the artist and, at the very least, co-plotter/co-creator of The Fantastic Four and had a hand in virtually all of the Marvel books created in the 1960’s. Black Panther? Jack Kirby. Captain America? Jack Kirby and Joe Simon (another name which should be better known today). Sgt. Fury? Thor? Hulk? Iron Man? The X-Men? Kirby, Kirby, Kirby, and Kirby. If he didn’t outright create these characters, he had a hand in their creation.

Further, he produced literally thousands of pages of comic books for Marvel until he left the company in the later 1960’s. And not on very good terms.

The other very big character to come out of Marvel in the early 1960’s, which I mentioned before and which was arguably Marvel’s most successful property is Spider-Man.

While Jack Kirby created an early version of the character, it was not used. Instead, Spider-Man was co-plotted and drawn by one Steve Ditko, who also created or co-created Dr. Strange…

Image result for steve ditko

And her we come to the excerpt from the novel I mentioned above.

Read it here:

The Stan Lee Story That Tore Apart Marvel Comics

While you’re at it, check out this article by Jillian Steinhauer which also explores Stan Lee, the person and the myth…

The Unheroic Life of Stan Lee

The bottom line of both articles is this: Stan Lee was a showman. He was a man who loved to promote Marvel Comics as well as himself.

He did this incredibly well and deserves a great deal of credit for the success of Marvel Comics.

He worked well with many creative people. He also wound up alienating and losing the two people who should be, like Stan Lee, the face of Marvel Comics. Yup, Jack Kirby and Steve Ditko.

Without getting too far into the weeds of comic book writing, Marvel had a method to the “writing” of their books which was different than the standard full script writing method. Basically, in the Marvel method, the writer would not write a full script but rather a general, perhaps even very general, plot idea. Theoretically this would be enough for the artist to then draw out a full issue, pacing the pages and panels as the artist sees fit. After the artist was done, the writer would get the pencilled pages and write captions and dialogue for the book. Rinse, lather, repeat.

Only…

Jack Kirby and Steve Ditko were incredibly imaginative people. While there’s no doubt Stan Lee wrote some really great dialogue/captions in the various books he was listed as the “writer” (his style is quite unique and one can see the difference in books he had a hand in versus those which were completely done by either Jack Kirby or Steve Ditko), there is a great deal of argument as to just how much of the plot of the various stories -and the character creations- he actually had a hand in.

Jack Kirby, in particular, created character after character after character while working for Marvel. The story goes that one day when he dropped off a batch of pages of the latest issue of Fantastic Four, Stan Lee asked him who this one character flying on a surf board was.

“The Silver Surfer,” Kirby reportedly told him, indicating it was solely a Jack Kirby creation… yet one that Stan Lee would later on take from Kirby’s hands and control his stories over the objections of Jack Kirby. Reportedly, this was yet another of the many issues which infuriated Jack Kirby and eventually led to his leaving Marvel Comics.

On the other side, Steve Ditko was known to have clashes with Stan Lee as well regarding the direction of Spider-Man. Ditko, a man who was almost the very opposite of Stan Lee in terms of how he carried himself (introvert versus a very extroverted Stan Lee!) reportedly left Spider-Man and Marvel when he could no longer take Stan Lee’s attempts to put his fingerprints on Spider-Man’s stories.

In the end, we’re talking about things that happened in the 1960’s, now fifty plus years ago. We don’t know the whole of the ins and outs of their situation but do know this: Marvel Comics was blessed with three very talented individuals: Stan Lee, the fun loving carnival barker who drew in fans to the fledgling company. Jack Kirby, the titan of ideas who could release a mind-bogglingly large number of quality pages/stories each month. And Steve Ditko, another titan of ideas who, while not as quick as Kirby, arguably created/co-created Marvel’s seminal character in Spider-Man.

And also not arguable is the fact that of this trifecta of people, both Jack Kirby and Steve Ditko left this company and in doing so shared very much the same complaints regarding Stan Lee.

It’s a fascinating story, and one wonders if, had they been able to work together better, would they have created even more spectacular works into the 1970’s?

That’s something we’ll never know.

Love the art…?

There’s an old saying about “loving the art, not the artist” when it comes to works you really like but whose creator is someone you may have issues with.

It’s an intriguing thought experiment and it does point out your tolerance for the antics of people and also, perhaps, your limits.

Of late, various cast members of both Buffy The Vampire Slayer and its follow-up series Angel have spoken up about creator and main producer Joss Whedon.

What they say about him isn’t pretty.

There have been stirrings for a while regarding Joss Whedon. Back in 2017 his ex-wife Kai Cole wrote a scathing letter regarding her ex.

Among other things she pointed out his hypocrisy, that he claimed he was a “feminist” while having numerous affairs behind his wife’s back. Click the link in the above paragraph if you want to read the full details Ms. Cole presented.

Still, Mr. Whedon remained a high in demand director. He had a cult following for his various series, including Firefly, which while perhaps prematurely cancelled, was popular enough to have Serenity, a concluding feature film made out of it.

But there remained whispers out there about Mr. Whedon and the next big negative press he received occurred following his taking over for Zack Snyder to finish up (actually re-do, based on what I’ve read) the 2017 film Justice League.

Actor Ray Fisher, who played Cyborg in the film, originally praised Mr. Whedon. Perhaps it was part of the Hollywood game to offer praise to all those you work with. In time, though, he had a change of heart and announced he could no longer do it.

In 2020 Mr. Fisher formally accused Joss Whedon of “abusive, unprofessional” behavior. Jason Momoa, who played Aquaman in the film, lent support to Mr. Fisher, noting that “serious stuff went down” during the Justice League reshoots which Mr. Whedon made.

Though less vocal, Gal Gadot, who played Wonder Woman in the film, also stated her experience working with Mr. Whedon “wasn’t the best one”.

Now, within the past couple of days, Charisma Carpenter, who played Cordelia Chase in both Buffy the Vampire Slayer and Angel, took to twitter to not only say she believed Ray Fisher’s accounts of Joss Whedon’s abuses, but that she herself was a victim of them.

It’s truly a harrowing account and, from the link in the above paragraph:

Carpenter’s accounts of Whedon’s “harassment” and “serialized abuses of power” include him accusing her of “sabotaging” “Angel” by getting pregnant and “calling [her] ‘fat’ to colleagues.” For Whedon, perhaps, it all ended with him “unceremoniously” firing Carpenter from the series after she gave birth, but the actor couldn’t move on that easily.

After Ms. Carpenter spoke, the floodgates truly did open. Sarah Michelle Gellar, who played Buffy, stated she was proud of her work on the show but that “I don’t want to be forever associated with the name Joss Whedon. Amber Benson, who played Tara on the show, stated “Buffy was a toxic environment and it starts at the top”.

Perhaps the most chilling statement came from Michelle Trachtenberg, who played Buffy’s little sister and was a teenager when she worked on the series. She noted that after some incident between them Mr. Whedon and she, he was not allowed to be alone with her.

Incredibly, there are still more stories coming out, including one regarding how he abused female writers he worked with and took a sadistic pleasure in making them cry.

Yikes.

As I mentioned above, one can love the art but not the artist but there does come a point where the artist becomes so loathsome within your mind that the work produced by them may be tainted and, for you, impossible to love it again.

I’ve read posts from people who cannot watch any Mel Gibson films because of his drunken actions many years before. While he claims he was at the time drinking too much and nearing a nervous breakdown, its still tough to accept his racist and abusive words -all recorded- as simply coming out of that alone.

Similarly, following the death of David Bowie, there were those who noted he is alleged to have had sexual relations with underage girls back in the early to mid-70’s. Yeah, it was a different time and there were teenage groupies who made it a point of sleeping with rock stars and, yeah, there so many drugs being used and, yeah, there are similar allegations/stories related to other very big musical artists who were popular at the time…

…but you know what? All that’s an excuse if these people, who should have known better, were allegedly having sex with underage girls.

Unlike David Bowie, I’m not the biggest Joss Whedon fan out there. While I enjoyed Buffy, Angel, and Firefly, if I never see an episode of these shows I truthfully won’t miss them. Similarly, I doubt I’ll revisit either of his Avenger films or his version of Justice League.

Further, based on the press he’s getting now, I wonder if he’ll become a pariah in Hollywood and we’ve seen the last new material from him.

Perhaps.

But I love the music of David Bowie and I’ve mentioned it plenty of times around these parts. As much as I like his music, I’ve taken great pains to avoid any detailed biographies about him. I’ve done the same regarding biographies about Led Zeppelin. The Doors. The Rolling Stones. Even The Beatles.

Why?

I suppose its a form of cowardice on my part. I so like the music created by these people and I’m afraid I won’t know how to feel about this music I love so much when I’m confronted by all the alleged nasty details related to those who created them.

Recently, Courtney Enlow presented this article for io9.com:

It’s Well Past Time to Rethink ‘Auteur Theory’ and the Way Actresses Are Treated

In the article, which touches upon the recent Joss Whedon revelations, Ms. Enlow points out the oft told story of how director Stanley Kubrick treated actress Shelley Duvall on the set of The Shining as well as actor Tippi Hendrin’s revelations about how Alfred Hitchcock treated her -sadistically- on the set of The Birds.

I love both films and consider them classics of the horror genre.

But each time I hear/read the stories about how Ms. Duvall and Ms. Hendrin were treated on the sets of these films… I can’t help but realize that what we’re seeing on the screen is genuine suffering by the actors who were treated terribly by those two directors.

And I have to admit… I don’t know if I can watch those films again.

Two films I love by directors whose work I generally love. Songs created by people who may have been engaged in some very questionable activities.

It’s a tough line to draw.

When can one no longer love the art because of the artist?

Zack Snyder’s Justice League Trailer…

Today, Valentine’s Day, we finally get a full on trailer for the upcoming release of Zack Snyder’s Justice League

If you’ve been living under a rock (which, apparently I have been, which I’ll explain in a moment), after the release of Batman v Superman: Dawn of Justice, director Zack Snyder got to work on a follow up, Justice League.

However, as he was nearing the end of the film’s creation, his adopted daughter committed suicide and Mr. Snyder left the film to be with family. Joss Whedon came in and while the powers that be at DC claimed Whedon was simply finishing off the film as Zack Snyder wanted it finished, the resulting theatrical release in 2017 clearly showed something that was very different in tone and structure from what Snyder released with BvS.

A determined group of Zack Snyder fans subsequently flooded the airwaves and Warners with pleas they “release the Snyder Cut” of the film and their pleas, as the above trailer shows, resulted in action.

Now, I know there’s plenty of controversy regarding Zack Snyder’s interpretation of DC characters. I happen to be a fan of BvS and make no bones about it, though my admiration is for the extended/director’s cut of the film versus the butchered theatrical cut.

I have yet to see Snyder’s Man of Steel and, truthfully, have only seen one other actual Zack Snyder directed film, his remake of Dawn of the Dead. No, I don’t consider the 2017 theatrical released version of Justice League a proper Zack Snyder film, though I can’t say I hate it, either. It’s just… there. Neither terrible nor terribly great.

Anyway, I’m interested in seeing Snyder’s cut of Justice League. However, I’m not going to lie: The above trailer didn’t do all that much for me.

I didn’t hate it but neither did it grip me like I hoped it would. Further, you can tell its an older work. Gal Gadot, Ben Affleck, and the rest of the cast look younger (well, I suppose except for Jaret Leto, who reportedly filmed his scenes new for the movie) and many of the effects presented seem to come from another era, even if that era took place only a few years ago.

Things have a way of moving along, no?

Still, I’m eager to see this new version of the film though, at four hours long, I suspect I’ll see it in two sittings.

Finally, that bit about living under a rock: I totally had no idea about the “we live in a society” line that Leto says at the end of the film.

Reading some of the comments in YouTube under the video, many people said they were laughing out loud at that last line and, doing some investigating, realized I had missed a whole long “we live in a society” meme that’s been associated with the character of the Joker, though the character of Costanza on the Seifeld TV show used it as well…

So yes, dear folks, I had absolutely no clue about the line and its association with the character of the Joker so the humor of it escaped me completely

I’m so very behind the times, he says, as he hangs his head in shame.

Ah well, won’t be long before the movie’s released.

I do hope its a good one.