TV Review: Young Justice Is No Justice League

DC Comics’ “Young Justice,” a two-year cartoon TV series loosely based on comics, is no “Justice League.”

There, I said it. That’s probably the worst criticism I can level at the show, because despite plot holes you can fly a planet through and characters who pass around both the Idiot Ball and the Angst Ball as if it were nuclear waste, “Young Justice” is pretty good.

Robin, Aqualad and Kid Flash.

The show starts out with a small group of teen boys, who have all served as sidekicks to major superheroes, trying to get into the Justice League (the adult superhero group), only to have the adults tell them they’re too young. The teens, being rebellious, rebel, and after some hijinks, the League ends up making the kids their own team, with their own superhero base and a superhero babysitter.

At first, all the heroes are guys: Aqualad, sidekick to Aquaman; Kid Flash, sidekick to the Flash; Robin, sidekick to Batman. Speedy, the sidekick to the Green Arrow, is holding the Angst Ball at this point in the series, so he runs off to sulk and do some heroing all by himself, because he doesn’t need any meaniehead adults. Early on the team finds and recruits Superboy, who isn’t a sidekick of Superman but instead is his clone.

Later, the team grows to include Miss Martian, whose powers are just like ones her uncle, the Martian Manhunter, has. Miss Martian suffers from an acute case of Smurfette Syndrome for a while before another girl joins the cast–an archer named Artemis.

Aqualad is black and Artemis is at least part Asian, which isn’t necessarily easy to tell at first due to the art style of the show (which, mind you, is pretty good).

Aqualad is easily the best character on the show, with the best personality and quite possibly the best powers. He’s got gills and can breathe underwater, but he’s also got magic, which he uses to control water, making it into weapons, and he can electrocute people with a touch. And he manages to be interesting despite being a steady, responsible type, so I have to give the writers a lot of credit for writing a strait-laced character well. That’s not always easy–Cyclops of the X-Men can be a real jerk (one time he got married to a girl who looked exactly like his dead girlfriend, had a kid with her, and then when his dead girlfriend came back he dumped the wife and the kid too) and Leonardo, I’m sorry, but you were the most boring Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtle.

The other character that really shines here is Lex Luthor, as evil as ever but always a wild card. This Lex Luthor can always be counted on to be on his own side and absolutely nobody else’s. Sometimes that’s good for the kids; sometimes it’s horrible. He usually plays both ends against the middle with great success.

Alas, the show’s writing is uneven, and this manifests most clearly in the characters’ lack of consistency. To some extent I was willing to ignore this because teenagers can be moody, but when you see someone previously portrayed as easy-going suddenly dissolving into a jealous rage it’s pretty hard not to give the writers the stink-eye.

Then there are the plot holes, which I would have been willing to ignore if they had been based on suspension of disbelief. But they weren’t. They were also related to character inconsistency, in that characters who had previously acted one way in a situation would behave completely differently in a similar situation later, usually because it had to happen that way to make the plot happen.

Because the plot requires it, characters throw around the Idiot Ball and the Angst Ball constantly, and everybody seems to take a turn at being dumb-because-the-plot-demands-it. Even villains and adult superheroes who ought to know better.

It’s still a pretty good show, and I’m sincerely grateful it introduced me to the awesomeness that is Aqualad, but “Justice League” is better. If you have to watch only one, pick “Justice League,” but most likely no one is forcing you to do that, so go ahead, give “Young Justice” a try.

Just make sure you don’t get caught with the Idiot Ball.

 

Fat girls can’t have pockets; or, why women REALLY shop so much

As many of you likely already know, I started swimming again, made changes to my diet and got a personal trainer, all of which has resulted in the loss of quite a bit of fat, several dress sizes, quite a bit of girth and a tiny bit (not much) of weight.

So every month or two, I have to go and buy new pants, which I did again last night. No big deal, except that this time, I was hoping very much to drop from the “plus-size” section to the “normal” section.

For those of you who are men, prepare to have your minds blown with a graphic description of how women’s clothing actually, really, truly works, and no, you are probably not going to believe this.

And let me say as a caveat, this is a store that I like, a store that even has plus-sized clothes. This isn’t a store that hates fat women more than other places, and in fact, it’s actually quite a lot nicer for us in this particular store than most stores.

Other stores are much, much worse.

Men’s clothes are in one section of the store, and children’s clothing is in a separate section, which is simple enough. The thing you need to realize is that in a typical department store, women’s clothes are divided up into four or five separate sections. Completely separate. Like, on opposite ends of the store from each other, with shoes or housewares in between.

These sections are:

Petites: This is where short women go to shop. It’s not the largest section, but the clothes there are stylish and colorful.

Juniors: This is where young women go to shop. This is the trendiest section, where clothes are very colorful, tend to be a little more revealing and they are also a little smaller in size (but not length).

The nameless section: This is where average-sized and below-average-sized women shop. Average, remember, is a size 14 in America. This size does not correspond to a measurement of any kind; it’s an arbitrary number, and sizes in this section go up to either 16 or 18–either one or two sizes above average. In other words, a substantial number of women cannot shop in this section.

Women’s: This is where it’s easy to get fooled, because Women’s is not for all women like the men’s section is for all men. It’s for plus-sized women, and the clothes here usually start at 16-18 and then range up. This is a small section, and mostly contains clothing that is either meant for older women or clothes in sedate hues that blend in with the background. When I’m angry I call it the “whale” section, because the only pants you will find there are whale-colored–grey, black, brownish, drab–and because they seem to want to segregate people of all sizes above average in a different part of the store, away from others.

The point is, before women can even shop at all they have to figure out what section to go to, and for those of us in the 16-22 range it’s going to be a little tricky and may require bouncing around the store either cheerfully (because we’re smaller than we thought) or gloomily (because we’re bigger).

It’s even more complicated because the size numbers don’t mean anything, so at some stores you can fit into an 8 and at others you will need a 12. This is to be expected, but what isn’t, necessarily, is that even within a brand the sizes vary significantly, and in fact, even the identical pair of pants in two different colors can be two different sizes.

Every garment must be tried on.

Now, what I learned yesterday is that the women’s section, which I’ve been shopping in since college, because I am fat, has its own sizing system. While you might think that a size 18W in a given brand would be the same as a size 18 in the exact same brand, you would actually be completely, totally wrong. I’m sure there’s a reason for it, but it doesn’t make a lot of sense to me, because the women’s section at this particular store goes all the way down to a size 14, which is well into the “nameless” section’s range.

So I dropped from a size 18W to a size 18, which was somehow very unsatisfying, even though it really is a meaningless number.

But I also learned something else. Within the “nameless” section, there were three different styles of pants: Modern, Skinny Style, and Curvy.

I did not try on any Skinny Style jeans, but I did give the size 18 Modern pants a shot. They were too small, even though the size 18W pants in the same brand and style are now barely clinging to my hips and dragging several inches on the floor. The Curvy pants fit a lot better, and I grabbed a pair of them. Then I looked for another pair, but they only had one pair in my size. Black.

I’m certain the store doesn’t mean anything negative by labeling them “Curvy,” but I couldn’t help feeling just a little bit bitter, so I texted a friend: Heaven forbid fat women should forget that they’re fat for 3 whole seconds! They might start thinking they’re people or something!

That’s when I realized that, unlike the Modern pants, the Curvy pants didn’t have pockets.

They won’t even let us have pockets, I thought.

I paid for my pants and escaped, hoping for and yet still dreading the next trip, when I’ll probably drop to a size 16. Or a size 14W, or hey, I know, maybe I’ll just give up and wear Jedi robes to work from now on.

These are not the pants you were looking for. Move along.

Daredevil’s Season 2 isn’t as good as Season 1. It’s better.

I hesitated a little bit when the second season of Daredevil was released on Friday, thinking it had to be worse than the first season. Some of the people involved behind the scenes have changed, after all, and there was no possible way they could continue zigging when every other show around them zagged, was there?

I’m going to put all my Season 2 spoilers in white print so you can highlight and read them, but here are just a few things I loved about Season 2, many of which are a continuation of Season 1:

• Foggy and Matt’s friendship is presented as being critical for both of them. In the first season, Matt was given a scene few if any men on TV are allowed: he cries, not because of physical pain or because of the death of some woman he’s close to, but
  because he’s afraid he’s losing Foggy’s friendship. He cries for himself, and it showed how high the stakes are and that Matt has an inner life.
• Women are never presented as being mere adjuncts to men. Elektra turns up in season 2, but she has her own agenda, her own life and her own past. Karen continues with her streak of dogged independence and determination to pick at the truth until it shows itself fully. Even the antagonistic lawyer has her own fish to fry.
• Women look like real women. Yes, they’re all thin and conventionally pretty, because it’s television, but they don’t all look like models. Look at Karen’s skin sometime–you can see flaws in it, because she hasn’t been airbrushed and photoshopped half to death.
• The show returns to a single theme over and over again: that even if two people truly, truly love each other and have the best intentions, they can still be completely wrong for each other and hurt each other very, very badly. This isn’t just romantic love, either: people frequently deal devastating emotional blows to others they love (romantically, platonically or familially) during season 2. There are toxic relationships here that just can’t work no matter how both people try.
• The heroism of little people is highlighted again and again. Matt may wear the Daredevil suit, but Foggy, Karen and others around him accomplish incredible feats of heroism with no superpowers and wearing ordinary clothes.
• Gun violence isn’t glamorized. This show is incredibly violent, and while Matt’s fighting style is that of a dancer, the Punisher, and some of the bad guys, use guns. And it’s ugly. It’s bloody, it’s brutal, it’s very uncomfortable to watch. And it should be.
• The Punisher is fantastic. This is a comic book character whose backstory is the most incredibly cliched one imaginable: Bad guys killed his wife and family and now he’s out for revenge. The Dead Wife trope needs a fork stuck in it very badly (seriously, guys, it’s done), but this show did the best possible job of working with the established story that it could have. Frank’s quest for revenge hasn’t made him happy or given him peace. Instead, he’s horribly broken and, for a significant part of the show he seems to be dead inside. It is very clear his vengeance isn’t helping him. And the actor is amazing, investing the character with an odd backwards charisma; he’s utterly charmless but the horror of his experiences has left him something other than an ordinary human.
• Elektra was also great. She had a lot of presence, and the show allowed her to avoid being a simple sex object. And I’m so glad they didn’t give her that ridiculous loincloth outfit, I mean come on, really?
• Matt makes a lot of terrible decisions in this season that end up hurting him, and every single one is a natural one, coming from a well-established character trait. All of the characters make mistakes and those mistakes seem to be natural consequences of who they are, not imposed by an external plot requirement.
• The show’s use of religion continues to be excellent. The themes are there, and touched on frequently, with reference to Matt’s Catholicism and another appearance by his priest. This is one of the more accurate portrayals of a pastor I’ve seen, by the way–not hollow-worded piety, but practical advice and a devastating moral discernment.
• People have lauded the way Jessica Jones used the color purple to thematically underscore the presence of the Purple Man. Pay attention to the way Daredevil uses red.

Reel Bad: Movies for the Strong of Stomach

Some movies are good. The best of them become legends, cult favorites or classics, and they have enough fans that people still talk about them decades later: “The Godfather,” “Raiders of the Lost Ark,” “The Princess Bride,” “Casablanca.”

Some movies are terrible. The worst of these also become legends, cult favorites or classics, and if you don’t think this is true, you should probably look up “The Room,” “Plan 9 From Outer Space,” or “Reefer Madness.”

They’re not just bad. They’re Reel Bad.

I’ve started a new blog here on AreaVoices, exclusively for the purpose of reviewing and picking apart bad movies.

Take a look!

North Dakota School’s Dress Code Is Rotten for So Many Reasons

A controversial change in the dress code at Dickinson High School, N.D., has sparked heated debate and outrage from students, parents and the public.

Parents of students, along with unrelated adults, wrote hundreds of comments arguing for and against an updated DHS policy concerning the wearing of leggings and yoga pants, both popular articles of clothing for girls and women.

According to the article, the school is claiming the dress code is intended to “help students feel comfortable in school.” But of course, what students have actually heard from adults is that those clothes are “distracting to the guys.”

Let’s take a look at what all this actually means, and why policies against leggings and yoga pants are such a bad idea.

1. The fact that yoga pants and leggings aren’t allowed is itself a demonstration that the policy is very clearly not about student comfort at all, as leggings are in fact extremely comfortable for the wearer. So if the policy is about comfort, it’s certainly not about the comfort of the girls wearing the pants, but perhaps the comfort of those not wearing them. Right there you’re privileging some students’ “comfort” over that of other students.
2. The policy is sexist, although probably not on purpose. Technically, the policy is likely gender-neutral, but in actuality, it disproportionately affects girls. Most people who wear yoga pants and leggings are female. Let’s look at another example: What if the school decided to limit bathroom breaks to 5 minutes for all students? This would technically be gender-neutral, but would disproportionately affect girls, who typically have to take a little bit longer for various biological reasons. Yes, some boys would also be hurt by this, and yes, the policy is technically gender neutral–but it would still be incredibly biased against girls. Another example a little closer to the situation might be banning hair ties for all students–sure, it would hit a few long-haired boys, but the vast majority of those affected would be girls, even though it is technically gender-neutral.
3. It denigrates boys. Yes, you read that right. Boys aren’t rape monsters who will go berserk and start hurting women if they see a girl wearing tight pants. Boys are people. Yes, even hormone-crazed teen boys. Truly. Teen boys do great things all over the country every day! They win competitions, they work hard to excel in school, they hold down jobs, they help out at home. Boys aren’t bad people, and most of them have self-control that is just fine, thank you. Boys aren’t going to start fainting in the aisles at the sight of tight pants, and if they do do something untoward, or if they make inappropriate remarks about it, that’s what we call a teaching moment. That’s when the teacher has to show them why it’s wrong to do that. But seriously, most boys aren’t that fragile. They’ll be fine.
4. It’s unrealistic. Boys are going to see women in tight pants everywhere else, because leggings and yoga pants are commonly worn in public virtually everywhere by adult women as well as girls. You are not going to stop women from wearing yoga pants in public. Maybe you should be teaching boys that this is okay and normal (because it is) and that they need to learn to deal with this. Although the vast majority of boys won’t need to be taught this because they already know it.
5. Most people can’t even distinguish between yoga pants and normal pants. Yep, true fact. Yoga pants, like all other pants, come in varying levels of tightness. Many sets of yoga pants cannot be distinguished from ordinary pants by someone who is not wearing them. The policy may not actually specify yoga pants or leggings, to be totally fair–it might just say “tight pants.” In which case this argument isn’t really relevant.
6. It denigrates girls, by teaching girls that their bodies are inherently sexual. Sometimes a butt is just a butt, folks. It’s not inherently sexual; we need it to sit on and eliminate waste and connect our torsos to our legs.
7. Past generations have worn leggings and it was somehow not that distracting anyway. In fact, we were fine. That was the 80s and the 90s, when stirrup pants reigned and were later overthrown by leggings. We all wore leggings, guys. It was normal. Boys didn’t have seizures or start frothing in the aisles. They didn’t even notice, because it was normal and everyone wore them. And a few years later, they still didn’t collapse when we showed them our bra straps every day because spaghetti straps were in style. If they noticed or cared, they were polite enough to not mention it.
8. It doesn’t make any sense paired with other school policies. According to its website, Dickinson High School has gymnastics and swimming, both of which tend to utilize tight or scanty clothing. Do students swim in bathrobes? Do the gymnasts wear loose jeans and blouses with jackets? Before you say “You need scanty clothing for those sports!” let me remind you that no, you actually don’t.

Dump the policy, folks. It’s not a good one.

Review: Jurassic World hit me right in the nostalgia

Nothing could have matched the original Jurassic Park, but Jurassic World danced so well along the line between charming nostalgia and modern adventure flick that nobody should really care.

The movie was absolutely successful in capturing the feel of the original Jurassic Park, which all of its other sequels utterly failed to do, and made seeing dinosaurs amazing and awe-inspiring all over again, despite the proliferation of realistic-looking cinematic monsters. And it brought back some of the most beautiful touches from the first film, too – for example, a moment where you’re reminded the dinosaurs are living, breathing animals instead of just terrifying monster things out to eat the protagonists.

The dinosaurs are fantastic, and not just in a “movie monsters” way. The movie takes time to make them real animals, and each is a character. The velociraptors are terrifyingly intelligent pack hunters; the T-rex is a majestic killing machine; the triceratops are gentle.

Sprinkled throughout the film are a series of homages to the original, some subtle and some less so. I won’t spoil them for you, but one was already given away by the trailers and most of the posters – the corporate leader in the park wears white, just as John Hammond did in the original.

Then there are a number of occasions in the movie where the film doesn’t take quite the usual action flick route.

The park’s owner is an incredibly rich guy who actually, shockingly, isn’t a horrible person focused on money. The kids in the movie are less annoying than your usual movie children, although like all movie children the younger one has too much hair.

The adult protagonists, Owen (Chris Pratt) and Claire (Bryce Dallas Howard) aren’t complete cardboard stereotypes either. Sure, Owen’s a tough former Navy guy on a motorcycle, but he cares about animals; sure, Claire is career-oriented, but she is absolutely able to hold her own in a dangerous situation. And unlike some reviews have said, she’s not a damsel in distress in this movie, but an active character who makes decisions and acts on them.

That’s not to say the movie is perfect. There were a few missteps.

• Someone needs to tell Hollywood movie execs that we heartless career women very often have a pair of tennis shoes or hiking boots under our desks. Throughout the movie, Claire runs around in high heels without a misstep. While there are actually women who can do this, the fact that the actress had to train for it as if she were running a marathon should tell you it’s a little bit unusual. And then to do it in a jungle?
• Another thing: The kids in the movie were okay, but there was a thoroughly unnecessary “let’s-worry-about-our-parents’-marriage” subplot with them that seems to be present in every action movie lately. It doesn’t really harm the movie, but it wasn’t needed.
• Then there’s the one-note villain. Don’t worry, I won’t spoil it; you’ll know who this is the second he steps on the stage anyway. It’s about as subtle as an angry T-rex.
• The score shines, but it shines most when it’s using pieces from the Jurassic Park score by John Williams. Next time, steal more; you had the rights anyway. Why not pull in some of the lesser-used themes and bump them up? Petticoat Lane, anyone?

But the missteps weren’t enough to kill the sense of wonder we all felt when John Hammond first said “Welcome… to Jurassic Park.”

And that’s what this movie does: It brings back the wonder and the excitement of Jurassic Park and turns you right back into a 12-year-old. Enjoy it.

Yes, I Am an Evil Supervillain, Thank You

I’m Lex Luthor and Emperor Palpatine and Magneto and The Penguin.

Best-case scenario, maybe I get to be antihero Beatrix Kiddo on her roaring rampage of revenge in Kill Bill. But that’s on a good day.

Why am I turning into a supervillain? Well, if you believe the Myers-Briggs personality tests, I have an ENTJ personality. You can read all about Myers-Briggs here, and about that specific personality type here, but what that really means, according to lots of people on the Internet, is that I am a bad person who wants to take over the world and then kick puppies or blow up a planet.

That’s not what the research says, of course, or at least not in those words.

ENTJs are a rare personality type in general and even rarer for women. About 2-5% of men are ENTJs and only 1-3% of women. ENTJs are motivated, assertive, competitive, strategic. They’re influential and organized, but their standards are high and they don’t always take people’s personal needs into account. (Here’s where that came from, but you can find similar information all over the place.)

Here’s the problem: people apparently do not like the ENTJ personality. At all. Not even a little.

If you check out some of the fictional people generally believed to be ENTJs, they are some of the worst human beings ever put on page or screen.

• Here’s a list that includes The Penguin, Lex Luthor, Palpatine and Magneto.
• In Hunger Games, my representative is President Snow, arguably the worst human being in a three book/four movie series in which people frequently blow up entire districts and maim and murder children.
• From the Disney canon? ENTJ is represented by Gaston, the preening, odious villain from Beauty and the Beast.
• If you prefer Avatar: The Last Airbender or Legend of Korra, the sociopathic Azula is considered an ENTJ. She tries to kill pretty much everyone in the entire show at one point or another and has no conscience.

Does this mean I’m going to take up puppy-kicking and nun-punching as a hobby, and build a death ray in the basement? No.

I think it might actually mean that ENTJs are misunderstood.

• Yes, we can seem alarmingly insensitive, but that doesn’t mean we don’t care; it means that a lot of the time, we don’t actually notice. And if we do, it won’t be weighted as heavily as objective data. (Sorry.)
• Yes, we can seem irritatingly assertive, but groups we’re in will be blessedly free of restaurant choosing discussions that go “Where do you want to go?” “I don’t know.” “Eh, don’t care.” “What do you think?” “Not sure.” (repeat 10 times)
• Yes, we can seem quite bossy, but we see systems everywhere. We want them to be the best systems possible, and we want each person to do the best they possibly can. That’s not just because we like the system, either–it’s because we feel awesome when we’re doing our best and we assume everyone else does too.
• Yes, we often like to have plans. That doesn’t mean we’re devoid of spontaneity, though, just that we like to have a backup in case spontaneity spontaneously doesn’t happen. If spontaneity occurs we will happily scrap the plan.

In short, if you know someone who’s an ENTJ, give them a hug, or better yet, give them a rational, objective assessment of something awesome they’ve done. They’d probably prefer that over mushy feelings stuff.

But maybe you should keep the nuns and puppies and death rays away.

You know, just in case.

Music Review: Charli XCX’s “Sucker” Is Rude, Crude, but Pretty Good

Charli XCX

I wouldn’t want kids to listen to Charli XCX’s most recent album, “Sucker,” but if you don’t mind an F-bomb here or there, it’s great stuff–punk-flavored, hard-edged pop with retro-80s styling.

Madonna might have sounded like this, if she was starting her career now and if she were starting with as much musical talent as she acquired over the years. It’s aggressive, unapologetic pop, and every song sounds gloriously distinct from every other song on the album.

Ironically, the song that gave the album its name, “Sucker,” is probably the weakest of the lot.

The second song and second single released, “Break the Rules,” is better, a sort of middle-finger salute to school that revels in its own obnoxiousness. That shouldn’t be a good thing, but if Charli XCX can get the biggest square in town (me) to appreciate a rebellious attitude, she’s doing pretty well, I’d say.

“Breaking Up” is a bouncy, upbeat tune about having dated someone who’s really easy to break up with for an apparently inexhaustible list of reasons, some of which are funny and some less so.

I feel like I’ve heard “Boom Clap” before, possibly on the soundtrack to “The Breakfast Club.” Well, we know that’s not it, but the song would fit right in that era with its wavery synths.

Then there’s the song that doesn’t sound like any of the other tunes on the album, “Need Ur Luv.” Its title may have been deliberately designed to aggravate grammar nerds like me, but it’s like someone took the backbeat of “The Hey Song” and wrote a new song for it. A song that appears to be about an unhealthy relationship, whose upbeat tune doesn’t match its gloomy lyrics. And that’s before the little-girl voice Charli assumes partway through it, which makes it all even more disturbing–and wonderful.

That song happens to have been produced by Rostam Batmanglij of Vampire Weekend, by the way, and Charli shares a writing credit with Batmanglij and others on it. It’s the best of the album.

There’s plenty here for those who enjoy defiance-infused punkpop. Just chase any kids away before you play it, because there’s bad language and less-than-subtle references to sex and drugs, too.