God, I was reading that earlier today

I was expecting something very different from it

I agree with the general premise that "women superheroes should be allowed to be more than commodified feminist rolemodels"

but, then the spin to "true equality will be when the birds of prey movie is more like joker" is wild

what the fuck is this take

Imagine letting Harley be her own human-disaster self, not a forced role model for women. Imagine Birds of Prey not having the pressure of meeting absurd box office goals in order to square away its future. Imagine what kind of bonkers, off-the-wall, uniquely enraged movie that could be.

where in birds of prey did harley quinn become a role model

hopefully we can get a grittier, more edgier, less role-modely wonder woman sequel?? is that really the note we're ending on??

i was just about to come in here and comment on that 'true equality' bit

why do people keep moving the goal posts

i'm not into dc so i'll probably catch birds of prey when it hits streaming, but from everything i've seen harley isn't exactly a role model, which is fine, she doesn't have to be

What in god's name

that's the worst take

??????? why would she star in a movie like joker, shes a totally different character from joker with different beats and vibes what the fuck

if birds of prey were more like the joker, i'd have no interest in ever seeing it

I want back the time I spent skimming this

I saw Joker I do not want a Harley Quinn movie like Joker kthx

i don't even want a joker movie like joker

Imagine letting Harley be her own human-disaster self, not a forced role model for women. WHAT IS THIS TAKE

If the argument is that we deserve deep psychological character pieces about fucked up women, yes. That is not mutually exclusive with other movies just ... being ... fun ... Men get both y'all

But yes true equality is imo, treating female superhero characters like they have mythos that matter and deserve to be adapted with reverence and care

i'm just so deeply fucking confused has this person never read a harley quinn book in their life

This was the perfect Harley movie bc it was all the things that Harley Quinn is about.

yeah like true equality is harley quin getting a movie that fits her aesthetic, for personal lack of a better phrase

oh it was written by a dude that explains a lot

not forced into separate new genre boxes for a bad vox thinkpiece

minimoffs of course not reading the source material isn't a necessary part of Gender in Adaptation Discourse anymore

"bad vox thinkpiece"
is there another kind

"i don't care about female superheroes, but here's how to fix them"

Ppl just run they mouths and collect their checks and we're all blinking like what kind of tone deaf nonsense

sometimes I like vox thinkpieces (I also don't read Aja)

LMAO IMAGINE PAYING A MAN TO WRITE THIS PIECE I CANNOT RELATE

i think the fact that i've seen no marketing for this movie is more telling about how the studio felt about this movie as a "feminist anthem"

oh it was a dude

okay

i didn't want to assume since alex is a gender neutral name

like man i'm disappointed its not doing better at the box office but the marketing has been pretty scarce and people are fucking wary after suicide squad

but

johanssons: yeah i was like "it could be a lady/nb person...but i would put lots of money on it being a dude"

there's a feminist theme running through the film but that theme is "even terrible people deserve agency"

kadath: yeah iw as reading it like oh surely a man wrote this

the weirdest part was the comparison of Widows and Ocean's 8 then to BoP and Joker

I saw and enjoyed Widows and Ocean's 8 but Ocean's 8 made more money and had worse critical buzz

BoP has better reviews than Joker so obviously if it were more like Joker it would make more money?? i'm not sure where that's supposed to go

i feel like the fact that bop came out during a health crisis added a lot to why its not doing fantastic...

they also gave it a launch title that you had to already be a dc fan to recognize

yeah, the subtitle mentions harley quinn but like

it's so long and is it even in use in what little marketing there is??

yeah, there are a lot of factors

it really shoudlve been harley quinn: birds of prey to begin with

i remember being confused, personally, because harley wasn't in the original BoP right?

so why...

yeah when i hear 'birds of prey' i think barbara, dinah and helena. not harley??

she is not, the movie is more like "birds of prey" + harley quinn

gotcha

but when I heard about it I just assumed it was using the branding for a more "female gotham based superhero team"

shorthand, I guess

it does feature both black canary and huntress

also: WHERE'S POISON IVY

WHERE'S HARLEY'S GIRLFRIEND

in adaptations that are recognizably black canary and huntress, vs cassandra cain not being cassandra cain

i think that was the aforementioned gotham city sirens thing that was shelved

they do confirm harley as bi pretty casually in the intro though

ohhhh

OH SO THIS WAS THAT

okay, i wondered what happened to that movie

anyway I don't want to talk too much about the plot of BoP because spoilers, but I enjoyed it!!

and most of the decisions in that film made sense in context of it (except re: Cassandra Cain, who is still a fun character in this just not Cass Cain)

isn't she basically steph?

no

huh, all my other friends who've seen it have said so

not doubting your take, i actually trust your read more

I've heard she resembles a character from a Harley Quinn comic I've not read

but Cass a pick pocket teen noncombatant in this

I don't know where Steph would come from unless they've radically changed the character after New 52

since I heard she actually exists in DC continuity now

counterpoint: darker, grittier takes are not only the majority of what is wrong with comic books these days but also why dc kept making films nobody liked

I'm not saying that darker n grittier is bad necessarily but when it's the only flavor you've got boy it sure makes things joyless

also, outliers aside, rated r movies are harder sells than pg13

they on average make less money

there's also the overbearing fact that...the movie did fine?? by starting your article with the premise that the movie bombed you are inherently promoting the position that the movie bombed which has mainly been spread around by people who don't know how box office works and "get woke go broke" shitheads

agree

"performed under expectations" is not "a financial disaster that will kill all superheroine movies forever"

BoP performed under expectations and did okay, Sonic performed above expectations and did okay but the narrative going around is the BoP is the disaster of the century and Sonic is a Deadpool-level surprise smash hit and NONE OF THAT IS TRUE

Things! Exist! In Degrees!!!

birds of prey already was a movie about harley being her human disaster self

did this person even see the movie

they just seem really bent out of shape that harley isnt an unrepentent mosnter i guess

which is a quick way to single "i have never read a harley quinn comic before"

or watched the original batman animated series

i think it would be an easier impression to take from btas

a joker-style harley quinn movie would have even less to do with harley quinn than the joker movie has to do with joker

"despite making an estimated $81 million worldwide in its opening weekend, the film has already been labeled a commercial disappointment" that is not saying the movie Actually Bombed. that is saying "the movie did okay AND YET". I don't think the article actually reads that badly tbh.

the spin is not "true equality will be when the birds of prey movie is more like joker" it's true equality will be when "any woman superhero ... ever enjoys the same artistic freedom as Phillips and Joker"

And those are two very different sentiments.

The fact that they're actively derisive about Phillips' "edge-lord movie" makes it pretty obvious that the author didn't want a joker movie like the joker, either. But it is an example of a superhero film that's character driven and allows for an exploration of the personality and choices of its main character.

but there's no convincing argument that birds of prey isn't that

which makes the whole thing fall apart

it takes as a given that there's some feminist pressure on BoP that limited creative agency, but that can't be a given because that wasn't my read on the film at all

arguing that "she never harms Cassandra Cain" is a huge stretch, especially

and (and this may be because of comics reluctance to make female villains truly monstrous) harley quinn has always occupied a more ambiguous moral space

beyond imagining "feminist pressure" as in opposition to "creative freedom"

I mean, if you want to debate their read of Harley as a Bad Girl, go ahead. My issue was more with the misrepresenting what was actually being claimed .

Reading this now, I kept thinking about how much better Birds of Prey could’ve been had it been allowed to be more like Widows, a truly excellent film.

the article is arguing unconvincingly that birds of prey wasn't something it should have been, is the thing

so like, the claims it makes aren't really being that badly misrepresented, they aren't really strong claims

I have no idea what this would look like?? The example given is that "the team-up aspect is hard won in Widows and bonds slow to build" but given Harley ditches the Birds b/c she's terrible, that hangs at odds with the rest of the rhetoric

they are working at cross-purposes for most of the film, and some even outright antagonistically for most of it

so that point in particular may be a comparison between ocean's 8 and widows but also is weird to bring up when comparing those movies as woman-led team movies to birds of prey?

Imagine letting Harley be her own human-disaster self, not a forced role model for women ??? I don't accept this premise that gets landed on when the film clearly flirts with the idea of Harley's redemption and then rejects it

Honestly, I don't really care about what the article was arguing; I'm not invested enough in DC, I wouldn't have commented if not for the fact that people were actively misquoting things to frame their dislike / how terrible it was. And that was my point, not that the article Was Right.

what do you accomplish by doing that, honestly

i have probably nothing constructive to add since i haven't seen this but i skimmed the article but i just wanna say the comparison to the joker movie is dumb because a woman-led film will never feel as unnecessary and outright uncomfortable as the joker movie was/is for a lot of people and tbh is not a thing anyone should aim for.

i don't see anyone in here misquoting anything? if anything, everyone's backing up why they're quoting what they did with why the article is wrong... like nothing here is being taken out of context except the article itself

but the way the article mentions this film as a box office failure and then heralds joker's extreme box office success is rhetorically at odds with imagine Birds of Prey not having the pressure of meeting absurd box office goals in order to square away its future if that's the point really being strove for

the article itself doesn't have a coherent argument in the first place, so there's nothing to misrepresent

That's not ... really true. The article can be wrong and even incoherent, but if you claim it said something it doesn't, that is still deceptive, which I personally think is a pretty terrible way to engage with media, especially in communal spaces.

As far as what I gain... it matters to me because how people engage with media is a big part of the hobbies I'm in, and it was literally in my social media space.

I feel like the article also exists in a wider context of dudes who celebrate female-led films doing poorly as an example of the failure of feminism at large and the fact that it leads with BoP as a disppointing box office return, moves through the film's forced feminist heart, and then mentions how well joker did at the box office is

hmm, not unworth noting, even if the essay isn't itself "pro-joker"

that's a heck of a way to make the argument that maybe the dceu was a mistake and imo it's right to point out how that fuels a certain vocal faction of fandom

even if I'm sure the article's author would disclaim them

and given True equality will be when Harley Quinn can star in a movie like Joker is a bolded subheading in the piece I'm puzzled that would be considered a misrepresentation, though I guess that's part a clickbaity headline vs article content issue

also i think there's an argument to be made about a misinterpretation of an incoherent point being deceptive

but as stated I have problems with the more nuanced idea that Joker was allowed to be character-driven and BoP wasn't and that's really one of my key disagreements with the article!!

yes, I think one of the issues we're discussing with the article have to do with the way certain points seem to be at odds with other points, which of course means the quotes have different meanings in context vs out of context, but i'm not sure it's fair to call it deceptive

especially when the original context is readily retrievable. you can think it's unfair, though, certainly.

but scanning up I'm not seeing anything that really strikes me as a misrepresentation of at least some of what the article was saying, there is a point that the hard R of birds of prey might allow them to make a movie that is darker, grittier— and more rewarding which then segues directly into talking about Joker

i even identified the general premise of the article as "women superheroes should be allowed to be more than commodified feminist role models" at the very beginning?

harley quinn is basically being dc's answer to deadpool so the joker comparison is even more limiting and wrong. peoppl

this whole article seems to hinge on this dude thinking female characters aren't allowed to be anything more than archetypes and monoliths in a superhero genre. harley isn't the joker. she isn't the right character to do a joker style movie with? it's a stupid comparison.

and by 'not allowed' i mean he thinks studios are limiting them, which is somehow even more reductive thinking??? because it's SUPERHEROES WHERE THAT IS THE POINT.

yeah I'm pretty sure the people who made this movie wanted to include a message of emancipation because that's… part of the appeal of Harley Quinn going solo? Wonder Woman crew wanted to make a female empowerment movie because why else would you make a WW movie? That is entirely why Wonder Woman was created?

even if you take as true the idea that pop-feminist plot elements made BoP a weaker movie (which I don't, but someone could) it doesn't follow that these elements were the result of limited creative freedom

there's a better point about how this film was saddled with the legacy of Suicide Squad unnecessarily

the biggest criticism along those lines i've seen is "wow the villains really are just caricatures of sexism" and i definitely think the movie picked black mask and zsasz pretty deliberately

because like, that's them right there

they picked two guys from the gotham set who are known just for being the worst

though black mask is also charismatic while being the worst, and that translated really well

evil ewan mcgregor is not a problem for me

he did such a great job

the character definitely could have fallen flat if it wasn't for that performance, now that I think about it

black mask is a character who's always fallen flat with me in comics, so i don't doubt it

b/c you're right, black mask is just the worst

which is why he's often used as a bad guy for more antiheroic characters

catwoman, jason todd

i remember a lot of groans when it was announced who mcgregor's character would be

he did great though, there's nothing as evil as a monogrammed wardrobe

then zsasz is like, not even a personality, just a ghoulish gimmick

and one that typically lends well to just being as big a creep as the writer wants to make him

yeah

i'd actually call the one the movie went with restrained

which says more about zsasz as a character

even in movies i think batman begins namedropped him as a serial murder-rapist who gets a lighter sentence to illustrate the system is corrupt