YOU CAN’T WIN OR LOSE WITH DIVERSITY CHOICES

In the world of comic books, there’s no path to pleasing everyone with the selection of gender, race or religion for key characters.  Take a hero who is traditionally white and/or male and reimagine as someone else, and there’s a backlash.  Populate your universe with too many white males, and there’s a backlash.  Is there too much emphasis on diversity or not enough?  The answer is that, for skilled storytellers, the selection of characteristics should be a beginning point, not a conclusion.

The question of diversity in the entertainment industry is a subject of pervasive debate, and is certainly not unique to superhero depictions.  It does take on a heightened significance for a juggernaut like Marvel Comics, however, for several reasons.  With Marvel superheroes (and DC), your starting position is defined by a tableau in which the most iconic, famous figures – the signature elements of the brand – were created 50 to 75 years ago and are undeniably dense with white males.  Whether that’s a fault of the times, a lack of vision in a different era, or simply a mirror of the predominantly white male writers and artists in the industry back then, it is too late now to change the past.

Marvel, moreover, is wildly popular and enjoying a fabulously successful Renaissance.  The MCU is a multi-billion dollar enterprise, and in a state of perpetual evolution with each new movie, television initiative and print development.  The casting and character choices made by such a high-profile entertainment dynamo will naturally have a spotlight that a lesser franchise would not inspire.  The core fan base, too, tends to be a younger crowd than many brands, and the conventional wisdom is that millennials place a higher premium on diversity than earlier generations.

In print, Marvel has been leading a charge in diversification.  Thor is now a female, Captain America is African American and Iron Man is a black woman.  Characters like Miles Moreno and Kamala Khan are wearing the costumes of formerly plain vanilla heroes.  Has Marvel gone overboard?  I’ll assume the creators know what they’re doing in terms of satisfying the core fan base while expanding the appeal for commercial and artistic success.  As has always been the case, it will all depend on what the artists and writers do with those characters, beyond the selection of gender and ethnic characteristics.

In film, it’s been a recurrent source of controversy.  The protagonists in the first five installments of the MCU were all white guys.  Why so long to schedule a female lead with her own movie?  Why no films yet featuring a hero of color?  The Iron Fist of the comic books was a Caucasian male, but the choice of a Scandinavian-looking dude for the Netflix series was regarded as a missed opportunity for an Asian master of martial arts.  Take the Ancient One, an elderly mystic from Tibet, and make him a white woman – what’s that all about?  And now the latest flare-up is the casting of Zendaya as Mary Jane Watson in the upcoming Spider-Man movie, when the Mary Jane in the comics is clearly a redheaded white girl.

Anyone criticizing the Mary Jane decision, in my view, is missing the point.  Zendaya is a much better choice for the part than Kirsten Dunst, notwithstanding her redheadedness.  The essence of Mary Jane in the comics is that she’s a head-turner who knows it, gorgeous, self-confident and out of Peter Parker’s league, a wild party girl who ultimately shows unexpected depth and resolve.  Her first line in Spider-Man #42, when meeting Peter, is “Face it, tiger – you just hit the jackpot.”  Kirsten Dunst is far from unattractive, but she projected a vulnerability and self-doubt that was out of whack with the MJ from the comics.  Zendaya has the ravishing looks for the part.  We’ll see if the scriptwriters and director can better realize the original character.

Ultimately, with all of these diversity choices (or lack thereof), the critical thing to remember is that an accent is not a character, nor is a skin color, religion or gender.  You can assign those incidents of identity at the outset, but having done so you can’t think you’re done creating an interesting or engaging character.  Robert Downey, Jr. breathed dynamic life into Tony Stark – he wasn’t just playing the part of a generic white male.  Zendaya can be an awesome MJ, but it won’t be because of her pigment.  You can’t treat diversity as an end game.  You still have to tell a compelling story with three-dimensional characters who will move and thrill the audience.  Diversity won’t redeem a failing effort, but certainly won’t hinder success.

And no matter which way they go with casting choices, they’ll never satisfy everyone.

 

MASSIVE POLL FRAUD!

It’s obvious to everyone that Donald Trump’s presidential campaign has been a spectacular success.  Look at his rallies – tremendous crowds, they all love him.  Everything he says is headline news.  No one, including himself, can take their eyes off him.  He’s the most amazingly popular candidate in human history, you can just smell it in the air.  Yet there’s a malicious rumor circulating on the internet, and it’s been picked up by the liberal media elite and blared like tuba music across the liberal airwaves.  Supposedly, somehow, Trump is allegedly behind in some kind of “polls.”

There’s only one possible explanation: massive poll fraud.

The polls are rigged, there’s no doubt about it.  You can’t go to a Trump rally, overflowing some stadium, with a sea of people united in the conviction that this is the man who will make our country great again, and not walk away without a shred of doubt that indeed he will be the next President of the United States.  The depth of certainty inside each and every Trump supporter is worth a dozen random calls to a sampling of potential voters.  Whoever is responding to these polls obviously doesn’t have a clue what this election is all about.

Internal polling by the Trump organization, based on in-person interviews with a representative cross-section of the American public at Trump campaign events, shows Mr. Trump with an insurmountable lead.  Indeed, many of those polled believe prison with hard labor would be too good for Crooked Hillary.  Surveys filled out by visitors to the Trump for President website confirm the same common sense conclusion.  Gangs of Trump supporters report the same results derived from informal straw polls taken at a wide variety of drinking establishments.  The truth is apparent to anyone willing to examine the hard cold facts.

Yet the leftist media elite is fixated on the story that some unidentified “polls” suggest the next President, Mr. Trump, is under water among potential voters.  They claim that phenomenon is showing up in national polls, and is also the case in carefully selected places they choose to describe as battleground states.  When they’re asked to identify which polls, they say all of them.  They can’t name a single one.

Some left-wing gurus like Nate Silver try to get around the facts by aggregating the data from multiple polls, as if taking an average is the way to find out what’s really going on.  Mr. Silver, of course, has an agenda.  This is the same guy who predicted in the last two elections that Barack Obama would win.  Pretty clear which team he’s cheering for.  Adding together a bunch of crappy polls and dividing by three doesn’t make him right.  That’s the same Rotten Tomatoes formula that tried to convince America that Suicide Squad was a lousy movie.

The corrupt Democrats taking these polls probably aren’t even actually communicating with real people, maybe just calling each other and saying “What do you think?”  If they do make contact with actual voters, they must be calling the same reliable liars again and again.  Poll responders that give the answers they’re looking for are taking calls five times, ten times.  If the crooked pollsters accidentally get a Trump voter, they probably hang up fast.  This is poll fraud on a massive scale, to support the myth that Donald Trump could possibly be behind when he’s not.

This is the man, after all, who performed superbly in the polls throughout the Republican primaries.  Little Marco, Lyin’ Ted, they hardly dared look at the polls.  The Trump leads then were massive, no problem there.  That was back when polls meant something, back when an honest candidate could occasionally make reference to his lead in the polls, secure in the assurance that he was simply conveying the candid facts to an adoring public.

To prevent the rigged system of poll fraud that has arisen since the Republican Convention from infecting the electorate and deceptively cooling the Trump fever that is sweeping the entire nation, we must immediately institute a system for verifying the legitimacy of any future poll results.  Go to the Trump website and volunteer to be an impartial Trump Poll Observer.  Only polls conducted under the direct scrutiny of TP Observers, including intervention where necessary to make sure alleged respondents are actual citizens who know what greatness means in America and to keep pipsqueak pollsters from getting out of line, will be recognized as reliable indicators of the national attitude.

Those volunteering to be Trump Poll Observers will also make a voluntary financial contribution to the Trump campaign.

 

10 REASONS TO EXPECT BAD REVIEWS FOR DC MOVIES

The latest entrant in the DC Extended Universe, Suicide Squad, has been released, and three things are happening just as expected.  First, the reviews are bad.  Second, the DC faithful are angry about the negative critical reception.  Third, the movie will have strong but ultimately disappointing performance at the box office.

None of these circumstances should come as a surprise.  For the DC fans who petitioned to shut down Rotten Tomatoes due to perceived anti-DC bias, the idea of Marvel manipulation is not a plausible conspiracy theory.  With the disclaimer that I am a loyal Marvel enthusiast and I have not seen Suicide Squad, here are ten reasons why the drubbing by critics is exactly what an informed observer should think would happen – and only as to the tenth item will I confess my own allegiance may be a factor.

1. Second-comer status. The DCEU is attempting to replicate the success of the Marvel Cinematic Universe.  Everyone knows that is the jealous objective here.  It is never easy to be the second entrant in a market dominated by an established competitor.  Good luck, Bing, in displacing Google.  The natural reaction is skepticism, not enthusiasm.

2. Saturated market. There are a lot of comic book-themed movies out there these days.  And a lot of sniffling and moaning about it among filmmakers and critics who aspire to higher artistic pretensions, as evidenced by the excess of disparaging comments at the Academy Awards, for example.  I regard that as a misapprehension that comics are juvenile by nature, but whatever the reason there’s not a welcome wagon for yet another superhero franchise, much less the launch of an entire additional universe.

3. Playing catch-up. Marvel was able to build methodically.  When Nick Fury referred to “the Avengers initiative” at the end of Iron Man, it had the thrill of surprise, the opening of a secret door.  By the time Superman met Batman, on the other hand, the next six or eight installments had been announced and there was an air of impatience to get to the Justice League.  The rush to introduce the players was reduced to an internet search in BvS and a three-ring binder presentation in Suicide Squad.

4. Corporate drive. Hollywood studios generally are oriented on making money, but something about the DCEU smacks of a boardroom initiative aimed at providing talking points to executives for quarterly financial updates to investors.  The brain trust at Marvel are comic book devotees who preach reverence for the source material, and they’re paired with Disney and its tradition of Imagineers.  It shows in the product.

5. Weight of expectation. Every DC offering is measured not just by its internal merits, but by its role as a building block.  It has to perform strongly enough to serve as a foundation for the coming structure, yet it is cursed by telegraphing the predicates for future components.  That’s something that can be handled more or less clumsily, but it comes easier for Marvel with its longer fuse and more established platform.

6. Poor track record. The DCEU entrants have all underperformed, so far.  DC and its fans have been dying for runaway blockbusters that to date have failed to materialize.  Blame the critics, or the caprice of the market, or the fates, but a string of disappointments casts a shadow on the next.

7. Dark branding. Doubtless to differentiate itself from the lighter touch at Marvel, and building from the tone of the Dark Knight trilogy, DC has adopted a dark cinematic persona.  It didn’t have to be that way – the Richard Donner Superman films and the Tim Burton Batmans were successful both in terms of dollars and with critics, but were not grim and oppressive.  But DC has chosen its path now, and it’s a bit of a downer.

8. Zack Snyder. There’s a fair consensus that the selection of Zack Snyder as chief visionary for the DCEU was a misstep.  Yes, the man has vision, but it’s rather lacking in humor, subtlety, character development and coherent plot, and heavy on heavy-handed violence, striking images and pounding themes and sound tracks.  If you’re going for acclaim from critics, try someone a little farther removed from Michael Bay.

9. Troubled production. It’s a bad sign when the pre-release news leaks are about reshoots in the wake of wretched reviews for the previous movie.  Especially when they hire a company that makes trailers to spruce up the film.  That’s like putting the ad agency in charge of quality control.  Fantastic Four exhibited similar warning signs, and that landed with even more of a thud.

10. Inferior source material. What Marvel has done right is to capture the exuberant spirit of the Silver Age revolution of the 1960s, when Stan Lee expanded the comic book market to older fans by incorporating more complex characters, social relevance, a zip of humor and high drama and adventure.  Marvel heroes have always lived in the real world and had real-world problems.  They are relatable and lend themselves to interaction with each other.  DC fans can say “Us, too!” but I’m not seeing it.