Tweets of the Week (9/21/14 - 9/27/14)

The many faces of stately Wayne Manor

Despite hearing mixed things about Gotham, I decided to give the premiere episode a try.  It's a far cry from Chritopher Nolan's Dark Knight Trilogy, which I consider to be the gold standard for all things Batman, but I do like seeing Donal Logue as Harvey Bullock enough to maybe stick it out a while longer.  One thing I noticed while watching the show was that the building used to portray Wayne Manor looked very familiar:

That building is the Webb Institute's Stevenson Taylor Hall, the same building that Joel Schumacher used for the exterior shots of Wayne Manor in both of his unspeakably awful Batman films.  Gotham is being filmed mainly in Manhattan, so reusing Stevenson Taylor Hall right there in Glen Cove probably made the most sense.

My favorite version of Wayne Manor is the one that appears in Batman Begins; Christopher Nolan used Mentmore Towers for both the interior and exterior shots:

Oddly enough, the design of Mentmore Towers is based very closely on the design of Wollaton Hall, which was used to portray the completely rebuilt Wayne Manor in The Dark Knight Rises:

( I'm not sure whether or not any interior shots were taken from Wollaton Hall; at least one scene was filmed in the entrance hall of Osterley Park. )

Tim Burton used Knebworth House for the exterior shots in Batman.  As much as I liked the movie, Knebworth House has to be my absolute least favorite out of all the different versions of Wayne Manor:

Tim Burton wisely used Hatfield House for all the interior shots in the first Batman film; I believe Hatfield House was also used in Batman Returns, though for some reason Burton decided to use a custom-built scale model for all the exterior shots in that film instead of using a real house.

The first time I ever saw Wayne Manor was the one shown in the campy Batman television series starring Adam West.  It has no fancy name, but you can call it 380 San Rafael Avenue:

That house is in Pasadena, California.  Sets were used for all the interior shots on the show, so I have no idea what the inside of that place really looks like, but I bet it's fantastic.

Tweets of the Week (9/14/14 - 9/20/14)

My take on the Marvel Cinematic Universe (so far)

Marvel Studios has done a pretty fantastic job of putting together a film franchise that they call the Marvel Cinematic Universe.  When I first heard about The Avengers, I wasn't very excited about it, mainly because I never read any of the Avengers comics in the first place; also, I assumed it would just turn out to be a jumbled Schumacheresque mess of a movie that did none of the characters any justice anyway.  Boy, was I wrong.

Thankfully, Joss Whedon turned out to be the one who directed The Avengers, and it ended up being one of the best superhero movies ever made.  Even people who don't normally enjoy superhero movies will find lots of things to love about this movie.  ( By the way, if you're boycotting everything Joss Whedon does because he said something stupid on Twitter, please do yourself a favor and get over it.  Dollhouse is probably the only thing I've ever seen him inject politics into, and even that was still watchable. )

You can still enjoy The Avengers for what it is without necessarily seeing all of the other films in Phase One of the Marvel Cinematic Universe, but you will probably enjoy it much more if you at least watch Iron Man and Thor first--both are solid films with terrific casts that have directors who actually give a shit about what they're doing.  I can't think of anyone better to play Tony Stark than Robert Downey Jr., and I've seen Jon Favreau direct good movies before, so I wasn't really surprised by how much I enjoyed Iron Man.  What did surprise me was how much I ended up liking Thor;  Kenneth Branagh did a superb job of blending what is basically a fish-out-of-water romantic comedy with just the right amount of sci-fi-ish Shakespearean tragedy.  ( Some have tried to accuse Branagh of political correctness for casting Idris Elba as Heimdall, but Elba somehow fits in the role so perfectly that it actually makes it hard for me to imagine anyone else as Heimdall. All of the casting was spot-on, really, even the small parts. Tom Hiddleston was especially great as Loki, which is probably why they decided to bring him back again later as a villain in The Avengers. )

The Incredible Hulk is definitely one of the films you can do without.  I'll go even further and say that you should actively avoid it, even if you're a completist.  As I mentioned before in another post, Louis Leterrier made such a mess of this movie that it makes Ang Lee's deeply flawed Hulk seem like a cinematic masterpiece by comparison.  I still don't understand why they made this awful remake instead of just making a better sequel to Ang Lee's movie that ties things into The Avengers.  And Edward Norton just ends up being replaced by Mark Ruffalo for The Avengers anyway, which only makes the whole exercise seem that much more pointless.

Iron Man 2 isn't really necessary in order to understand The Avengers, but it's still worth seeing if you enjoyed the first Iron Man movie.  A lot of what worked in the first film is still there in the second, but it still felt to me like something was missing.  ( Jeff Bridges, maybe? I dunno. )  Mickey Rourke seemed either miscast or misused, and I got tired of seeing his weird face and stupid hair after a while.  My favorite part of the movie was watching Sam Rockwell chew the scenery as a minor villain who doesn't know that he's a minor villain, but your miles may vary.  Oh, we also get treated to a preview of Scarlett Johansson in her Avengers catsuit, so there's that.

Captain America: The First Avenger was a decent movie, but most of it was pretty forgettable.  I have nothing against Captain America, but I liked him as a character much better in The Avengers than I did in his own origin movie.  Well, there was one scene at the end of Captain America: The First Avenger that I really liked, but that scene was only added to give Samuel L. Jackson a place to make a cameo appearance.  If the best part of your movie is just a setup for another movie, you've done something very wrong.  Too many characters felt like throwaways.  Even the villain didn't feel like a fully formed character to me.  How can you not make the Red Skull, a super-evil Nazi with a giant red skull for a face, more interesting than this?  ( And why did he have to spend so much time looking like Hugo Weaving? I like Hugo Weaving, but come on. We already knew from the ads what he was going to look like, so why hide it? )

Just as Phase One ended with The Avengers, Phase Two will end with Avengers: Age of Ultron, also directed by Joss Whedon.  ( I assume that Phase Three will lead up to a third Avengers movie, hopefully also directed by Whedon, but I can't say for sure just yet. )  The only Phase Two movies that I have seen so far are Iron Man 3 and Thor: The Dark World, both of which are worth seeing, but without knowing more about the second Avengers movie, I can't really say whether they are necessary or not.  If I had to rank the Iron Man movies, I would place the third somewhere above the second but still below the first.  I'm convinced that The Dark World would have been a much better and much more coherent movie if only Kenneth Branagh had been kept on to direct, but if you enjoyed the first Thor movie you can still enjoy the second for what it is.  ( I haven't seen Guardians of the Galaxy or Captain America: The Winter Soldier yet. I've heard nothing but good things about them, so I'll be sure to catch them both on DVD when I get a chance. )

Amazingly, Clark Gregg has appeared as Agent Coulson in Iron Man, Iron Man 2, Thor, and The Avengers, and now he even has his own show based around the character despite Joss Whedon's attempt to kill him off.  Marvel's Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D. was pretty uneven for most of its first season, but it had a surprisingly strong finish thanks in part to a terrific guest appearance by Samuel L. Jackson.  I look forward to seeing what they can do with season two.  One thing I really like about Clark Gregg is that he seems just as comfortable with drama as he does with comedy; one minute he's in a David Mamet film, the next he's on a goofy sitcom, and then he's playing Leonato in Joss Whedon's version of Much Ado About Nothing.

Tweets of the Week (9/7/14 - 9/13/14)

One World Trade Center

I like the look of the new One World Trade Center building.  Here's some video of it that someone took recently:

I like the shape of it.  The top is shaped like a square, and the bottom is shaped like a square, but the building ends up having eight sides because of the way it tapers.

Daniel Libeskind was the original architect for the building, but he was eventually forced to collaborate with David Childs.  It was probably for the best, I've seen what happens when Libeskind is left to his own devices.  Libeskind is a deconstructivist, so most of his designs tend to be rather bizarre; his design for the Jewish Museum in Berlin is one of the strangest things I've ever seen:

Jesus.  Can you imagine being in one of the surrounding buildings and having to look at that god-awful shitty mess all day?

Tweets of the Week (8/31/14 - 9/6/14)

What's in a name?

For some reason people are still arguing about whether ISIS (Islamic State of Iraq and Syria) or ISIL (Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant) is the appropriate name to use, and some are even accusing President Obama of using the name ISIL only because he doesn't think Israel has a right to exist.  It's true that Obama has never seemed very fond of Israel, but there's a good chance that he tends to use ISIL only because it's a more accurate translation of the group's Arabic name. The term al-Sham predates any modern concept of Syria the country; what al-Sham refers to is something that would more accurately be described today as Greater Syria, or the Levant.

I call them ISIL not to give their territorial claims any credence, but because that's just the most accurate translation of what they've been calling themselves.  I call them ISIL because I think it's just plain silly to act like these terrorist scumbags plan on staying within the borders of Iraq and Syria when we know damn well that that's not true.  We know what ISIL's goals are, and we know what they call themselves, so let's just be honest about it.  What disturbs me is not that Obama calls them ISIL, but that he so often treats ISIL as if it were a problem for only Iraq and Syria to solve.  They would wipe out Israel if they could, and they'd happily wipe us out too--why wait for them to make a serious attempt at either?

( Lately, ISIL seems to simply be calling itself the Islamic State instead.  I'm not clear on whether that's just supposed to be a shortened version of their name, or if now they are trying to claim the territory of the entire world, or what.  Maybe instead of debating the ISIS vs ISIL thing, we should be debating ISIL vs IS?  I think eventually it will reach the point where I just give up and start calling them The Terrorists Formerly Known as ISIL. )