By David Futrelle
The right-wing snowflakes are out in force, clogging up the internet with gloating comments about the alleged utter failure of Birds of Prey, a comic book movie about a lady super-gang headed up by Margot Robbie as Harley Quinn. In its opening weekend, you see, the film earned $33 million in domestic box office instead of the $45 million Warner Brothers was expecting.
To its angry-dude critics, the overwhelming majority of whom have not seen the film, this was proof that studios that “get woke go broke” because true comic book movie fans will reject this sort of “feminist propaganda” in favor of movies that don’t have quite so many ladies in them.
Naturally, some of the leading lights, such as they are, in the far-right griftosphere had things to say about Birds of Prey.
The right wing culture critics aren’t just mad that there are too many women in the film; they’re also mad that these women aren’t wearing skimpy enough clothing, thus making them ugly in the eyes of men who watch films with their boners. “They are so ugly,” complained one Twitterer, “why they dont choose pretty females? They seems like shemales, strong and masculine.”
BREAKING: Margot Robbie is ugly.
“[F]uck your gay ass woke birds of prey,” wrote another. “Sexualize Harley Quinn forever.”
You may or may not be shocked to discover that the film’s detractors include literal Nazis and at least one equally literal piss-drinker.
In a post on Sunday, The Daily Stormer trashed the film as “Another Gyno-Ghostbusters” with women not only in front of the camera but behind it. As the Stormer’s Andrew Anglin whined,
The film doesn’t just star women, it was also written, produced and directed by women. Even the soundtrack features exclusively female artists.
Actually, seven of the nine executive producers for the film are men, but it’s not like the Daily Stormer ever checks its facts..
Anglin sarcastically mocked the film’s less-than-perfect performance at the box office.
Basically, they are going to need laws forcing men to see these films. Because it is unacceptable for these women to go through all the trouble of producing these $100+ million films to lecture men and then men not show up.
Actually, as Variety notes, the majority of those who went to see the film were men, mostly over the age of 25.
And while most of the critics of the film’s not-sexy-enough-for-angry-dudes ladies focus most of their ire on Margot Robbie’s Harley Quinn, Anglin is more troubled by the inclusion of, ahem, “afro-kike” actress Jurnee Smollett-Bell, though even Anglin admits she’s easy on the eyes.
Gotta say, for combining the two least attractive races – black and Jew – into a single individual, Jurnee Smollett-Bell did alright. Definitely bests Meghan Markle on the old “male gaze-o-meter.”
Meanwhile, Birds of Prey has also drawn the attention of YouTuber and former novelty congressional candidate Joey “Salads” Saladino, perhaps most famous as “the guy who literally peed in his own mouth on video”
In fairness to Mr Salads, he says he didn’t actually swallow any of the piss that he deliberately pissed into his own mouth, so he’s got that going for him.
Film criticism is weird.
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I’ll take the Kansas weather over the Minnesota weather right now. It’s going to get to a high of 1 tomorrow. It’s definitely negative something at the moment. At this time of year I just hate snow and ice so much!
Of course, come the summer, we’ll be luxuriating in 80 degree weather while much of the continent swelters in 100 degree weather so, hey.
Saw the film yesterday. It was not perfect (we could have used more interactions between the ladies), but my partner and I had an absolute blast. I highly recommend it.
The camera-treatment of Harley compared to suicide squad is very telling. Tastes may differ, but there was plenty of ‘sexy’ as opposed to ‘sexualised’.
In Massachusetts, the weather has been unusual this year. We haven’t gotten as much snow as in past years, but the temperature has fluctuated a lot. All winter, there has been a seemingly random alternation of days in the 40s and 50s (5-15°C) then it plunges back down to below freezing and there is snow and hail. I’ve lived here for over a decade and most winters this hasn’t happened, I’m guessing it has to do with climate change.
@Alan:
*laughs* My parents had that happen near them. The Canadian Cancer Society has a ‘Daffodil Month’ in April as one of their fundraising efforts. Of course, in order to have daffodils available at the start of April, you need them to bloom before the end of March, which means you need them to sprout mid-March and it needs to be warm enough to trigger sprouting near the start of March. For a lot of Canada, this is a pipe dream, even though daffodils are normally one of the earlier spring bulb flowers.
My parents live in Victoria, which is on the West Coast and one of the warmer locations in Canada, so a lot of daffodils get grown there. But every few years you get some daffodils trying to bloom in February, and then getting snowed on. I’ve got pictures somewhere of confused daffodils poking up out of snow…
I’m in the “better to bundle up than swelter” camp.
Not that I get to do much of that where I live, but we did go to Disneyland on a day last week where I could walk around with a sweater on and my hair down. ~Bliss~
@Demonhype:
I know I heard somewhere that the idea of Ghostbusters ‘franchise operations’ was one of the earlier ideas for a sequel, and I do wish they’d kept with that rather than essentially rewriting the original story. Wouldn’t have pleased the hardcore anti folks, but would have given the writers a bit more world to play off.
(A friend of mine said he actually preferred the 2016 Ghostbusters in part because it spent a bit more time on ‘how did they scrape together enough money to actually start this’.)
As for the rest… there seems to have been a lot of that. A rather out lesbian artist friend of mine spent a good bit of time drawing images shipping some of the 2016 Ghostbusters.
Heh, you want rough winter weather? come see me in the greater Montreal area. Had big snowstorms both last friday and this monday. And if you want REALLY rough, go to the Maritimes – St John’s, Newfoundland had a 75 cm snowstorm not too long ago. Lucky for me, I actually like winter. Probably because my parents bothered to initiate me to the joys of winter sports when I was a wee tyke (don’t really practice any of them anymore though, as my waistline indicates).
As for Ghostbusters 2016, well, weirwoodtreehugger mentioned that it was a genderflip on a standard eye-candy stereotype, but it’s a stereotype I tend to actively dislike (like in Suicide Squad, say, with the gratuitous “Harley stripping down to her skivvies for a very appreciative male audience”, or the blatantly sexualized way Mikaela Banes -Megan Fox’s character- looks under a car’s hood in the first Transformers movie, or the awkward Star Trek: Into Darkness scene where we get a full frontal view of Kirk’s love interest wearing nothing but a bra and panties for no damn good reason; none of those movies needed those scenes, just pure pandering to horndogs; I rolled my eyes at every one of those). If I want to be titillated, I’ll watch stuff where titillation is actually supposed to be a big reason to watch from the start, thank you very much. Or at least make the titillating scene a plot point, don’t have it just… be there.
Also, similar to what Demonhype said, if it had been a continuation (like their idea for Janine striking out on her own), I would have been much more interested, regardless of the number of y-chromosomes on the team (or lack thereof). I also agree that they should have concentrated more on things other than the special effects, which seemed garish and bloated to me.
In any case, can’t say I hated it as I haven’t seen it yet; haven’t gloated about its failure (whether it actually was one or not) either, since I considered a “failure” to ensure I’d not see anything from that franchise again. Cautiously optimistic for Afterlife, though (emphasis on cautiously; at this point in time I don’t think anything is beyond Hollywood’s ability to fuck up).
One of my go-to examples for demonstrating the difference between “sexy” and “sexualized” is to compare how the Wonder Woman and Justice League movies depict Diana.
@Allandrel: I haven’t seen Justice League, but I saw Wonder Woman in part because my boyfriend’s into superhero movies. It was a nice change of pace from the usual way female action heroes are depicted by male directors. I may be bi, but if you’re going to sexualize women and not do similar to men, then I’m going to notice and possibly be irritated by that.
I don’t know why DC has such a difficult time making good films despite having such a wealth of iconic storylines and characters to draw on. Or perhaps the general public is just experiencing Batman/Superman fatigue? The last few Batman and/or Superman films were terrible, but Wonder Woman and Aquaman were great, and Shazam was my personal favorite because Captain Marvel is one of my favorite Justice League members (although I think Wonder Woman was objectively the better film.)
I haven’t seen Birds of Prey yet, although I’m planning to go over the weekend. I’ve heard good things about it. Suicide Squad was pretty bad, and I personally blame the fact that the writers didn’t really seem to have a good idea for what to do with the plot. Apparently the only thing Birds of Prey has in common with it is Harley Quinn’s design and the story is otherwise a completely separate universe, so I don’t have to worry about that association tainting it.
I’m really hoping they do a film based on the Gotham City Sirens eventually, because that’s a great group. It’s basically just Harley Quinn, Poison Ivy, and Catwoman doing a Golden Girls kinda thing.
I said the same to my partner (though without the Golden Girls reference since I have never seen it). If I recall correctly the action scenes in Birds of Prey were done by the director of John Wick, which made me happy as I could actually follow what was going on (I have a visual impairment), and what was going on was pretty badass.
I have my criticisms of the film, but on the whole it’s very much in the + category. I had a blast. I also really hope we’ll get a spinoff centred on this version of Huntress & Black Canary (and Montoya, either as The Question or just Montoya is fine).
@Talonknife
They could have just remade the animated Batman: Assault On Arkham, a VERY solid Suicide Squad movie that came out just a few years before.
It did not waste half its runtime introducing its characters, instead developing them over the course of the film.
It did not try for emotional payoffs that it hadn’t earned.
Of course, the same applies to a LOT of Warner Bros.’ DC output – their animation department has been knocking it out of the park for decades, but their live action studio never even considers “Hey, how has our very company successfully presented these characters?”
One of the best examples of this is that, prior to the DCEU, every live-action DC movie had an animated direct-to-DVD movie released to promote it… and the animated movie, that cost one-tenth what the live action movie did, would be ten times better. (Green Lantern: First Flight is a GREAT example of this.)
@Battering Lamb
I’m curious, is Montoya still a lesbian in the film? Or did it never come up? The only other explicitly gay major character in a mainstream superhero movie so far was Negasonic Teenage Warhead from Deadpool.
@Allandrel
The DC Animated Movie Universe movies were on Hulu last year (sadly, they seem to have been removed.) I watched all the ones Hulu had and Justice League: War is basically the live-action Justice League film but done infinitely better. The basic plot is the same with an Apokalips invasion, but the plot and characterization is done so much better. It still has the same basic plot of “we need to get Superman back to turn the tide” (although in this one he’s only captured by Darkseid to be turned into a living weapon and not dead; The Death of Superman came later when it could get a proper emotional payoff,) but the Justice League actually isn’t completely useless without Superman. They actually do like 90% of the work fighting off Darkseid, Superman just finishes him off.
I don’t know why they can’t translate the writing talent that makes the DCAMU into the live-action movies.
@Allandrel, Talonknife:
I think a lot of it comes down to perceived importance. Animated and especially direct-to-DVD movies are seen by the studio executives as ‘less important’, and thus they receive less meddling, and thus the writers can actually write without the executives or the big box office stars messing with the script.
The live action movies get the executives messing with the script to prove their own worth and because they ‘know’ that what this movie needs is (cliche of the month), and some of the big name actors changing things to make their own characters look better. End result is often a less coherent story.
Because that would require multi-millionaire movie executives admitting that they don’t really know what makes a good movie, and we have decades of demonstration at how hard they find it to admit that.
She is. Not much is made of it aside from some awkward conversations with her ex-girlfriend (which were fun as one is being a hardboiled detective and the other an exasperated lawyer). Also, during a flashback for Harley lovers are mentioned and you see 3 exes, one of whom is a woman. So it may not do much with it, but Harley is confirmed bi. I would have liked to see more representation that is not of a ‘blink-and-you’ll-miss-it’ variety. This film wasn’t really about romance, though. But having a woman centred film that was not about ‘who will they end up with romantically’ is kinda refreshing.
I don’t want to overpraise the movie (which I feel some are doing to counter the bad takes jackholes like the pissdrinker in the post), but I had a lot of fun with it. If you go in expecting to be entertained by women kicking ass, you will get that and then some.
I have read somewhere on the internet that the budget for Birds was “only” $88 million. That means a $35 million opening is by no means a disaster anyway. That said, not having Harley Quinn in the title seems like a ridiculous ball-drop. Tangentially related, the Harley Quinn cartoon series that dropped episode 12 this Valentines day is highly recommended.
Just binged the whole thing this weekend (Love Ivy’s character design, btw). Damn that show is violent. Not sure how I felt about consequences of the last scene though (though I doubt it will last).
My main issue with the Harley Quinn cartoon is that it is treading a LOT of ground that has already been covered by The Venture Bros.. That said, the cast is fantastic – if I had to pick a favorite, it would be Lake Bell’s Poison Ivy.
Saw Birds of Prey last night, and it was… decent. Not great, but I enjoyed myself. My main complaint was that the character named “Cassandra Cain” was not recognizable as Cassandra Cain in any way.
@Allandrel,
That could be because years ago, when DC replaced the Cassandra Cain Batgirl with the Stephanie Brown one, CC’s fans were pretty vocal about not liking it, with one female fan (dressed as CC) asking Dan DiDio at a convention if they were ever going to bring her back as Batgirl.
From what little I know about this controversy, it sounded like DiDio/DC were so p****d off that some fans were pretty vocal about disliking Brown that they decided to essentially erase Cain from the DCU as much as they could. This ‘wrong’ character design/writing could be a continuation of that erasure.
This comment may make me seem sexist, and if it does I apologize; that is not my intent:
But I should say I have no desire to see BoP, for two reasons:
Across multiple media I feel like Harley is being overexposed and that she’s generally a very bad role model.
Seriously, this is someone who willingly threw her life away to become someone that, by any reasonable standard, is LESS that what she was before. How is this popular?
And historically? Look, Harley is nothing but Paul Dini’s Manic Pixie Dream Girl.
Where the hell is The Engineer when we need her?
Also, if there’s no Oracle, it’s not Birds of Prey.