Critics Consensus: Thrilling, earnest, and buoyed by Gal Gadot’s charismatic performance, Wonder Woman succeeds in spectacular fashion.
That’s the highest rating any of this millennium’s Marvel or DC movies has ever got – for comparison, Iron Man got 94%, The Avengers 92%, Deadpool 84%, Guardians of the Galaxy vol. 2 81%, Logan (92%), Man of Steel 55%,and Batman v Superman and Suicide Squad both at 30%. Even the uncontested 70s classic Superman only got 93%.
Expectations are high to say the least.
The great and the good have already been to see it, of course, since although the London premiere this week had to be abandoned, the LA premiere still took place, with more or less everyone involved with Diana in some form over the years attending, from Susan Eisenberg (Wonder Woman’s voice in the Justice League cartoons and Injustice games) through artists Cliff Chiang and Tony S Daniel, writer/artist Phil Jimenez and movie/comics writer Geoff Johns all the way to Lynda Carter and Gal Gadot themselves.
Less positively, there’s been a minor kerfuffle over some planned women-only showings of the movie in New York, but the proprietors of the cinema have taken it all in their strides rather well.
The publicity machine continues, of course, with Gadot putting Conan O’Brien through some fight training on his show:
Oddly, though, last week only saw the release of one new comic featuring our Diana, Wonder Woman #23, although as it happens, it’s rather an important one. So follow me after the jump as we get to watch Diana finally sort the truth from the lies. Or you can just stay here and watch Jim Lee drawing Wonder Woman for charity – your choice.
It’s “What have you been watching?”, my chance to tell you what movies and TV I’ve been watching recently and your chance to recommend anything you’ve been watching.
WHYBW took a bit of a break last week, thanks to there being Twin Peaks to watch and not enough time to do that and write about other TV, too. But it’s back, just in time to catch some season finales as the US Fall season begins to wave its final goodbyes and the Summer season starts to kick in.
There have been a few new shows, too, in the past fortnight: the first episode of Downward Dog and those first two new episodes of Twin Peaks I’ve already reviewed elsewhere and I’ll be reviewing Still Star-Crossed (US: ABC) and previewing I’m Dying Up Here (US: Showtime) later in the week. But with a bank holiday weekend, I’ve had a chance to catch up with everything, watch a few movies and even try some of my backlog.
So, after the jump, I’ll be reviewing the latest episodes of American Gods, The Americans, Doctor Who, Downward Dog, The Handmaid’s Tale, Master of None, Silicon Valley and Twin Peaks, as well as the season finales of The Flash, Great News and Lucifer. Before then, a new TV show and not one but two movies!
You Are Wanted (Amazon) Amazon’s first German-language TV show is a Berlin-set ‘techno thriller’ starring (and written, directed, produced and composed by) one of Germany’s most successful actor-director-composer-writer-cameramen-producers Matthias Schweighöfer, who plays a moderately successful hotel manager and family man, whose life starts to fall apart when hacktivists start to take an interest in him for no obvious reason. Before you know it, they’re in every computer system he has from his laptop and smartphone through to his TV and child monitor, stealing his money, faking an affair and incriminating him in crimes, all while blacking out Berlin’s power system. What do they want and why him? Well, you’ll have to watch to find out.
The first episode was a touch more German in its production values than Amazonian (ie not as good and a bit silly at times), but while it’s not exactly Mr Robot when it comes to hacking, it’s not American Odyssey either, exhibiting a slight hint that it might know a bit about the subject at least. Schweighöfer is appealing, but there’s not much by way of thrills so far, just a lot of Schweighöfer playing with his family and reinstalling operating systems. But it’s promising enough I’ll probably be watching episode two this week at some point.
Word to the wise: despite promises to the contrary, Roku’s Amazon channel won’t display subtitles (I’ve fiddled with every setting it has and nada on anything I’ve watched). So, although half the dialogue’s in English, your German had better be up to knowing what “hydraulic fracking” and “epidemiology” are auf Deutsch if you’re to get by on that platform, so stick with iOS (which definitely does work) or something else. When I gave the subtitles a whirl, though, they turned out to be pretty bad translations that removed any nuance from the original (eg “Google is your friend” became “Use Google”), so I’m not sure that’s much better.
Passengers (2016) Mechanic Chris Pratt is in hypersleep on board a spaceship to a new colony, when a meteorite collision causes a malfunction on the ship. Pratt wakes up 90 years too early and he’s the only one on board apart from android barman Michael Sheen. Dare he wake up alluring writer Jennifer Lawrence to keep him company? And if he does, what will she do when he finds out he’s effectively killed her? And was his malfunctioning hypersleep pod the only thing damaged by the collision?
A lot has been written about the gender politics of Pratt’s actions in this and to be fair, the movie does go at great lengths not to dodge the ethical questions involved. It’s also far more of a piece of science-fiction than you might have assumed and everything looks very beautiful. But ultimately this is a two-hander between Pratt and Lawrence and how much you’ll want to watch this and their musings about the meaning of life and death very much depends on how much like both of them, whether you find their age gap a bit creepy and whether you think Pratt unconsensually violating sleeping Lawrence’s body (metaphorically) is too much of an obstacle to your enjoying the movie. There’s a brief appearance by (spoiler) Laurence Fishburne and a so-brief-you-probably-won’t-even-see-his-face cameo by (spoiler) Andy Garcia, too, which makes me think there’s a longer cut of the movie out there somewhere…
The Accountant (2016) An odd attempt to revive The Saint but without paying a licence fee, in which rather than Val Kilmer playing a swashbuckling and suave master criminal who adopts Catholic saints as his noms de plume, we have Ben Affleck playing a socially awkward savant and master criminal who adopts the names of famous mathematicians as his noms de plume, as he goes about… analysing the finances of whomever will pay him. Anna Kendrick is the Elisabeth Shue of the piece, a mid-level accountant who finds an irregularity in her employer (John Lithgow)’s books that Affleck can’t stop himself from investigating. Except Affleck has a very specific code of conduct and if any of his employers break it, he’ll use all the training his psych ops army dad gave him to kill them with extreme prejudice. Trouble is, Lithgow has hired Jon Bernthal (Marvel’s Daredevil‘s The Punisher) to protect him so Affleck might not find the going so easy and Treasury agent Cynthia Addai-Robinson is chasing after him in the exact same way she chases Ryan Phillippe in Shooter…
Written by Bill Dubuque (The Judge and Netflix’s forthcoming Ozark) and directed by Gavin O’Connor (Warrior), oddly enough the film is more about an accountant with autistic spectrum disorder than it is about a fighty master assassin, with Affleck redeploying the ‘tortured hero with a disability’ routine he used in Daredevil to evoke sympathy as he does a lot of A Beautiful Mind-like writing on vertical surfaces. But oddly, although its portrayal of ASD’s sensory issues as something that simply needs to be overcome through harsh regimens of fighting, flashing lights, loud noise and hitting yourself with a stick is probably a little contra-indicated, it’s surprisingly accurate, albeit more in a Bron/Broen (The Bridge) sort of way than Life, Animated, with Affleck’s character driven by, advantaged by and disadvantaged by his condition throughout.
The ending is surprising, the fight scenes are genuinely very good, and Affleck and Kendrick are frequently amusing together. And I promise you you’ll never see Martha from The Americans the same way by the end. It’s nonsense and there’s one scene in which JK Simmons sits down to explain the entire plot to the audience, but it’s nevertheless a jolly entertaining, surprisingly smart, surprisingly generous action movie that does for ASD what Daredevil does for blindness.
I love Le Bureau des Légendes (The Bureau). It is almost certainly the best French-language TV show I’ve ever seen and that includes all of Engrenages (Spiral). Good news! Season 3 is just starting on Canal+ in France, which means that fingers crossed, it’ll be on Amazon in the UK within the next few months.
However, in its native land, it has to be said, the ad campaign to promote it isn’t exactly going all out to sell its virtues. True, it’s not the most action-packed of shows, despite being a spy drama, although it does have its moments. But all the same, Canal+ is very much preaching to the converted with its latest campaign…
To be fair, they do have one cool one. Spoilers ahoy, obviously…
We’ve discussed before – albeit ever such a long time ago – the prosaic art of renaming things for international markets. There’s always a lot lost in translation, anyway, but when you’re going for maximum impact in as short a period of time as possible, as you are with a TV show title, then direct translation probably isn’t the best course.
Street Hawk translated into French? Faucon de rue, literally, but that’s really more or less Boulevard Falcon all the same. Which is silly and not at all cool. So in the end Street Hawk became Tonnerre mécanique or ‘Mechanical Thunder’, which is a bit more evocative at least.
But even when there’s no translation involved, sometimes things don’t translate, because while your audience might well speak English reasonably well – as they do in Germany, zum Beispiel – they might not get all those idioms that pervade the English language.
Take Doctor Doctor, a warm-hearted Australian show about a hot shot heart surgeon who ends up being sent back to his home town in disgrace where he has to face up to his family and his past. The word ‘doctor’ is pretty basic, but ‘Doctor, Doctor’ is the start of an entire class of English-language joke, which is why the show is so-called.
Can we expect Germans, Austrians, the Swiss, Czechs et al to know this, though? Probably not. And Artz, Artz just isn’t the same in German – there are no ‘Artz, Artz’ jokes.
So oddly, Doctor Doctor has now been retitled for the German-speaking markets as… The Heart Guy. Yep, still in basic English that anyone who can claim English as a second language (ie everyone in Germany, Austria, Switzerland, the Czech Republic et al) will understand. But now no idioms and everything’s self explanatory. People will know what The Heart Guy is about and they might even spot the slight subtext that “he’s full of heart”, too. But that’s not vital.
Yet despite everything, something’s been lost in translation from English into International English, don’t you think?
