JJ Field | Through the Shattered Lens

What does Wonder Woman, S&M, and Polyamory have in common? Pretty much everything. Professor Marston and the Wonder Women (PMWW) was…dull. You’d think with all the whips and ropes that the movie would pull some interest, but the scenes were shot hamfisted and clinical. I guess that makes sense to a degree because the stars were playing Harvard nerds who liked kinky sex, but man what a snore!

The movie was a Biopic about Professor Marston the creator of the lie detector test and I will forever know this because it was repeated over and over and over and over again. UGGHHHH. Professor Marston was a Harvard Professor who was married to fellow professor Elizabeth Marston. They are social psyche professors who are developing a lie detector test and are determined to bring Olive Byrne into their cult-like love life. This would be considered very creepy today, not for the S&M stuff, but because of the professor/student boundary crossing. They aren’t shy at all about their relationship, causing everyone to get expelled/fired. Honestly, I don’t blame Harvard on this one. He not only seduced a student, got her pregnant, and they all lived together. It reminded me of those separatist compounds.

Since no one is working, money gets tight. Eventually, Professor Marston puts his kink into high gear with ropes etc and this gives him the idea of Wonder Woman. He uses the two personalities of his two wives to give Wonder Woman a dual identity. It’s not a terrible analogy, just a terrible movie. Their unconventional marriage is discovered by their suburban neighbors and as a result; they split up for what seemed like 6 days. I blame the director on that.

There’s nothing wrong with being into an unconventional marriage or bondage, but I just didn’t expect it to be so boring. If anyone has an interest in S&M, just watch this film and you’ll be so bored of it, you’ll try something much more exciting like papier-mache! The movie concludes with a bookended plot line of him being investigated for using Wonder Woman to normalize bondage and polyamory and he even admits as much. So?? I don’t know if I’m supposed to care or not. Basically, I might be done with sex for good because I like a little excitement in my life and this apparently is a dead end.

HMM2

The summer of 2011 has been called the Summer of Superhero Films. In early May we had Marvel Studios’ Thor film premiere to good reviews and it has had a certain level of success (though not the level of The Dark Knight success rabid fanboys and jaded film bloggers think every comic book-based film should be doing). Then next up was the fourth X-Men film from Twentieth Century Fox by Matthew Vaughn that seem to reboot the franchise from it’s downward spiral begun by the third film and the Wolverine origins film. This film garnered even higher praise than Thor and many saw it as equaling or surpassing the X2. While it’s box-office success has been good it didn’t make the sort of money previous films in the franchise have made in years past. Then we come to the recently released Green Lantern from Warner Brothers and DC Entertainment.

This film was to be the next crown jewel to join DC’s successful Batman film franchise and iconic Superman series which seems to be the only DC properties to have had a successful live-action adaptation. While the film did very good in it’s first weekend the reviews of the film range from “ok and fun” at best to “downright awful” at its worst. All three films have huge budgets and, most likely, all three will be a profit for their studios, but not runaway hits.

Maybe the public has begun to tire of superhero films as a cause for the less than cosmic box-office returns. One other reason could be that too many people have been blinded by the massive box-office success of Christopher Nolan’s The Dark Knight that every superhero film must now be compared to that one fair or not. This makes the job much harder for Marvel Studios’ second film of the summer, Captain America: The First Avenger, as that film looks to cement the foundation for next summer’s major blockbuster ensemble superhero film, The Avengers.

I don’t see Captain America doing TDK level money, but early screenings of the film has earned it some major positive buzz that had been missing from Thor. That early positive buzz and this latest trailer which really showcases the action of this period piece of a superhero film should help push Captain America to be a success no matter if it makes 200million dollars domestic or more.

One thing I’m sure of is that this latest trailer should be more people excited for Captain America: The First Avenger when it comes out on July 22, 2011.