Diana Prince, cameo queen

I have to wonder how Gal Gadot feels about being asked to lend her star wattage in cameos in other DC movies, when they won't even make a third Wonder Woman movie.

The Flash marks the second 2023 DC film, and the second 2023 DC film in which Diana Prince makes a cameo. 

It's not a spoiler to mention The Flash, because the cameo comes in the first 15 minutes. It may be a spoiler to mention SPOILER ALERT Shazam: Fury of the Gods, because they hold that one to the very end and I'm sure they wanted us all to be surprised. Of course, we live in an era where everyone is all too eager to report that stuff, and who really cares about this kind of spoiler anyway. (Mine was a fairly ineffectual spoiler alert because the image above is from this movie.)

Well, it isn't obvious from either cameo that Gadot is annoyed, but I can't imagine she wouldn't be.

Now we all know Wonder Woman 1984 wasn't great, but I think we can all also admit it wasn't terrible. Okay, some people thought it was terrible. My love for the first movie and Gadot's performance in it probably allowed me to cut it some slack and give it a passing grade of three stars. But whatever you thought about it, the first was great and the character deserved to have a chance at a third.

There are a number of rumors floating out there about why it was cancelled, from Patty Jenkins walking away (that idea may have come from the fact that she was trying to juggle responsibilities on the Star Wars movie Rogue Squadron, which has also been cancelled) to DC changing the way it's doing things (an idea supported by the fact that The Flash is considered to be the last film in the DCEU). The reality is, studios bend and break their own rules if they think there is a reason to do so, and apparently they just didn't think WW3 would have the legs to be a success. 

Then why keep putting Gadot's legs in your movies?

I can't necessarily say that I'm frustrated that there will be no Wonder Woman 3, in a vacuum. Any indication that our unquenchable appetite for superhero movies might be dying off strikes me as a good sign for the movies. I'm not saying we have to get rid of them altogether, but maybe each studio gets to make one each year and that's it. I think their scarcity would certainly make us appreciate them more.

No, it's more like why does Wonder Woman not get a third movie when so many lesser properties do? I'm sure someone is out there making Venom 3 -- in fact, I've just confirmed it on IMDB -- and the first one of those movies was shite. I didn't see the second. 

Even more interesting about this whole "end the DCEU thing" is that The Flash is actually really good. Say what you want about Ezra Miller, you have every right and it's deserved, but Andy Muschietti delivered a damned entertaining movie. Don't tell me someone couldn't have found an awesome way to go with Wonder Woman in one more movie. And it wouldn't even have to have included all these other fools, because she was essentially the only superhero in the first two. 

But the really sad thing is: Without any of these other movies, we may not even see Gadot as Wonder Woman again. In fact, I think that's most likely. 

And try as she might, she just hasn't quite been able to duplicate that appeal in her other projects.

A Cyborg movie? Aquaman 2? 

Anything for one more movie from the cameo queen.*

*But wait a minute ... they are making an Aquaman 2. I forgot about the whole recasting of Amber Heard controversy. So why are they saying The Flash is the last movie of the DCEU? I can't keep any of this straight anymore. 

Elemental and The Flash, Take 2

I did actually take two on Wednesday night, when I watched all of Elemental and the 83% of The Flash that I missed on Sunday when my son and I had to leave the movie early. 

And I really liked both of them.

The context of learning all the details of Ezra Miller's many trespasses -- literally and figuratively -- in the time since I started my Flash viewing did not turn me off to them. In fact, I thought they were hilarious in this film, at the times they were supposed to be hilarious, and poignant in the times they were supposed to be poignant. (Miller is non-binary, hence the "they" pronoun. The grammarian in me still has a hard time with that pronoun and wishes there might be a better option.)

But let's not get ahead of ourselves.

Wednesdays are the day I most consistently go into the office. I didn't last Wednesday because I was still at the tail end of being sick, nor did I any of the other days last week, but this past Wednesday it was back to business as usual.

So Wednesday is also the day when I am out of the mix for domestic things, a price my wife will gladly pay because she enjoys having the house to herself those days. And she doesn't really have an issue with me just extending my absence until, oh, 11:30 at night if that's what it takes for me to catch up on the movies I haven't seen in the past two weeks.

The only thing about the schedule I drew up for Elemental and The Flash, though, was that it worked best for me to come halfway home on the train rather than staying in the city, and to see both movies at the Sun in Yarraville. That's my favorite cinema so no issue there. The issue is that the Sun is also where I started watching The Flash on Sunday. They are so casual at this place that I know they're not keeping track, but I did feel bad about making the same cinema give me a free ticket to the same movie twice. I did wonder whether it would be the same clerk who had served me on Sunday, but it wasn't, and they probably wouldn't have cared anyway.

But I am getting ahead of myself again as Elemental was the first up at 4:50. I had to leave work 20 minutes early to make it on time, but my boss is also one of those who doesn't care about such things. I had barely gotten the words out of my mouth (I didn't state the reason I was leaving early) and she was metaphorically brushing me out the door with her hands. In fact, I left early enough that not only did I catch the train I needed to catch to make the movie on time, but I caught the one before it.

As I said, I really enjoyed Elemental. It steadily climbed from 3.5 stars to 4 stars to 4.5 stars as I was watching, and though it's a generous 4.5 stars, I don't give that rating out willy nilly. It got there in the end, as Pixar usually but not always does. (In fact, wondering if I were too generous toward Pixar in general, I've re-read my two-star review of last year's Lightyear, to confirm that I'm not totally in the bag for this company.)

The Flash was set to start at 7:30, which left me plenty of time to go next door to Grill'd to get three sliders, a Corona and a basket of fries, or chips as they call them here. While waiting for the food to arrive, I started my review of Elemental -- and while eating it, I finished it. Yeah, I've gotten this review-writing thing down to a science. (You can read the review here.)

But I also took my time with it. Seven thirty came and went and I was still leisurely wrapping up my dinner.

It wasn't that I knew the Sun plays a lot of trailers. They don't, actually. You can rely on a movie to start within five minutes of its scheduled start time.

It was that I had already seen 25 minutes of The Flash just three days earlier. In fact, I think I arrived late on purpose just for the novelty of it. 

I got in at about 7:38, and sure enough, the movie had already been going on for a couple minutes. 

I wondered for a moment if the other people in the audience shook their head at me casually sauntering in late. I had wondered the same thing about the woman who'd gotten me my ticket -- who was the same one who had gotten me my Elemental ticket, and we had a little laugh about that.

But I know I didn't miss any of The Flash -- in fact saw 20 minutes of it twice -- and that's all that matters.

And I'm glad I prioritized tying up that loose end, as I really liked this one too. The review is here if you would like to read it. 

And just when I thought I was all multiverse'd out. 

Neither Elemental nor The Flash

I've been sick on and off for about two weeks, so that also means I haven't really gotten out to the movies. I'd say I haven't gotten out at all, except that's not exactly true -- though more on that in a minute.

In fact, because I started to get sick two Tuesday nights ago, I hadn't been to see a movie since the Saturday night before that when my older son and I went to see Spider-Man: Across the Spider-Verse. That was 17 days ago, an eternity in my world.

I'm a grown-up and I can wait to get back to the movies. But my website can't wait -- or at least, that's what I tell myself. You need to keep feeding reviews to your hypothetical audience or else they will leave you.

There haven't been any good streaming releases lately, and the offerings at the cinema hadn't really been wowing me either. That is, until all the sudden in one burst they started to.

Last Thursday saw the release of DC's The Flash, Pixar's Elemental and Nicole Holofcener's You Hurt My Feelings, all of which I planned to see and review. And by this past Sunday, I was feeling well enough to take my kids to one of them -- though probably not the one starring Julia Louis-Dreyfus as a woman in a co-dependent relationship.

My first instinct was Elemental, since I still consider Pixar movies to be events and since I knew there would be no issue of the content appropriateness for my younger son. I knew it would probably rule out my older son, but he's getting pretty indifferent to movies in general -- or wanting to watch things like Scream VI, as I wrote about yesterday.

The problem with Elemental is that the younger one is going to daytime activities at his school some of the days during school holidays, which starts at the end of this week. One of those is going to see Elemental, and my wife didn't want to lose that as a carrot on the end of the stick to get him to go to those activities without complaining.

So I shifted to The Flash. Bad idea. 

The older one still didn't want to go -- he's a bit superhero'd out -- and the younger one agreed with a shrug, which seemed to say "I wouldn't have considered it, but okay." He's still at the age where any activity with his daddy is a good activity.

But my son has a couple sensory issues, and one of them is an aversion to loud noises. The cinema assumes the opposite of its viewers, that the louder they play it, the better. So the Sun in Yarraville played it as loud as reasonable, which was exactly the right amount of loudness for someone like me.

Not for him. He clamped his hands over his ears quite a number of times in the first 25 minutes, which I didn't interpret as an attempt to shut out the movie entirely. I figured it was kind of like how some people will put cotton balls in their ears at a concert so they can hear the music better but block out all the noise.

I can't tell you what he did after the first 25 minutes, because that's when we left.

It's been a long time since I've had to leave a movie prematurely -- never with this one, and only once or twice that I can remember with his older brother when he was several years younger than the younger one is now. But I soon realized that whatever was ailing my younger son was not going to be fixed by telling him to close his eyes for a minute.

No, see, he told me he felt like he was going to pass out. 

He asked if he could go outside. Now, I'm embarrassed to admit what I'm about to tell you, but because I ultimately did the right thing I am going to proceed. I tried to arrange a plan where he would go outside for a few minutes and then come back in once he felt better, and was trying to make sure he had a ticket so he could get back in. You'll be glad to know that I abandoned this train of thought after no more than ten or 15 seconds. I left the theater with him, knowing that we probably wouldn't be back. For a movie completist like me, it's either see the whole thing or you might as well have seen none of it.

You'll also be glad to know that my son was fine. He wasn't having a medical episode and he didn't throw up. I just think the movie was too intense for him. The volume got him off on the wrong foot, and then things like Batman involved in a shootout with fleeing criminals on his Bat cycle just ramped up the intensity beyond what he could handle. I suspect it didn't help seeing Barry Allen's mother having been stabbed in a flashback.

He never told me what exactly it was that had bothered him to a point that reached critical mass, and because I didn't want to make him feel any worse than he already did, I didn't ask. It appears he was worried he had disappointed me by making me leave the movie -- and though that's true, I can't really help that and I really don't think I let on. My first instinct may have been to salvage the viewing experience, but my next was to be there for my son, and I really don't think my demeanor suggested I was put out by it.

So Elemental would have been the right choice, right?

Not so fast. Then the next night at dinner, my wife mentioned the school program during the school holidays and how they'd be going to Elemental. He didn't look too pleased by the idea. Apparently some friends had seen it this weekend and they told him it was "really bad," and that "everyone was kissing," or something like that. 

So if neither Elemental nor The Flash is the right movie for this son, what is?

You may recall that this is the same son who was supposed to see Spider-Man: Across the Spider-Verse with some friends the first weekend it was out, with me as their chaperone. Those kids ended up getting sick, which is when he bowed out so he could go with them on another day while I went that night with my older son. Poor kid, he probably didn't figure the option to go was never going to come up again -- but I gotta say, that movie wore me out enough that I don't really think I can sit through it again. 

So now, neither Elemental nor The Flash may get reviewed on my site at all, depending on how the rest of this week goes. Instead of those two top prospects with You Hurt My Feelings as a promising third, on Sunday night I watched and reviewed ... Extraction 2 on Netflix. (Which I liked quite a bit, actually. You can read the review here.)

Hey, gotta feed that hypothetical audience.