Radar Love: DAREDEVIL show on NETFLIX

ahh ta muchly.
i guess this means a standalone punisher series, which i'd totally be up for.
enjoyed daredevil s2 a lot, but damn, it was quite gruesome at times.
the wooden spikes into the fingers for stick was particularly difficult to watch.

oh god yeah *shudder*

I saw the first four eps, and they all ended pretty tidily, like the end of a 4-issue limited run. Then Elektra arrives and I'm all, hmm, OK, this must be like the start of another 4-issue limited arc. But then I come across reviews of future episodes regarding the Punisher on trial and battling ninjas and it scans like a totally different season of the show. I guess I sort of like how erratic these things can be from episode to episode, or season to season - just like the comics - but I kind of wish it wasn't biting off more than it could chew, especially since the material is pretty shallow to begin with, imo.

that's how they make the shallow material work -- they just push it together into a whole mess of stuff at once.

marvel cancelled a promotional panel for the upcoming punisher show a couple of weeks ago because of the vegas massacre; there's interesting piece on that at io9 here which echoes something i wrote itt last year

i think the show walked an interesting line with the punisher, though, and i'm still not quite sure how i feel about it. in 2016, a story about a disturbed white guy who conducts heavily-armed mass executions against those he perceives as having wronged him pretty unavoidably brings up memories of real-life situations from the recent past, all of which are horrific. the punisher shooting up a hospital early on in the show made me feel pretty queasy and that feeling never quite left despite the numerous reassurances that he was only targeting 'bad guys'.

bernthal was genuinely great, and the credit for any sympathy the audience has for castle is pretty much entirely down to how bernthal plays him. but i can't help feeling that the cultural context for the punisher in the 21st century is very different than it was for a character who was conceived in the post-dirty harry 1974.

i realise of course that the show hardly presents castle as a heroic figure but i kinda feel like if you're making a mass shooter one of your protagonists in 2016 it's impossible to avoid raising the spectre of real-life atrocities, and i don't think they navigated it entirely successfully.

― Upset by racist left wingers calling me an egg (bizarro gazzara), Monday, 21 March 2016 14:16 (one year ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

some pertinent quotes from the article, by charles pulliam-moore

Though he’s most often framed as a complicated antihero who abides by a personal code that defines his sense of justice, the Punisher is Marvel’s equivalent to a mass shooter. While his depictions in various comic books, television shows, and movies make a point of elevating Castle’s sense of morality to gel with the idea of him being a hero, it’s impossible not to see how he’s also a celebration of the kind of gun culture that makes actual mass shootings possible.

To make the Punisher the star of his own TV show is to valorize his character—and to ignore his potential as a symbol of and blueprint for an all too American kind of horrific violence. Those elements of his identity shouldn’t be erased; they should be pored over, deconstructed, and discussed in an open, honest way, as they were in Daredevil’s second season. Maybe Frank Castle’s solo TV series is looking to do the same—to establish him not as the MCU’s newest vigilante, but instead as a man who finds the ability to heal from his trauma without shooting up a city in the process.

But that’s a big “maybe,” especially given that the character has failed to do so for more than 40 years of comics, and it still won’t change the fact that the Punisher will always primarily be a “hero” that fights those he deems evil by riddling them with bullets. That might sound like a harsh assessment, but if Marvel and Netflix feel like even discussing The Punisher would be in bad taste after a mass shooting, maybe that’s a sign they shouldn’t release it at all.

i like jon berthal as an actor quite a bit but i've got a real bad feeling about this show - i dunno how it would be possible to make it anything other than massively offensive and wrongheaded unless it presents frank castle as an out-and-out monster

Maybe he trades in his guns for impassioned appeals to reason and decency, did u even think of that

tbh i'd be okay with 13 episodes of frank beating his weapons into ploughshares and volunteering at his local food co-op or whatever

i did enjoy lexi alexander's super-cartoony approach in the punisher: war zone movie tho

Lexi is a bona fide karate master fyi.

Also I'm three episodes into the new DD series and it sucks the big felota.

Aw rly? I’m looking fwd to it

Mite binge it this weekend

Allegedly The Big Fight Scene in this one is good. (Episode 4.)

So I assume everyone but me has hopped off the Marvel Netflix train at this point? Bummerz.

This season has finally brought the full-bore, scarily-omnipotent Kingpin we were denied in s1. Bullseye has been pretty well handled, also.

It's sounding very much like the upcoming second season of Punisher may be the end of the Netflix shows, so y'all won't have too much more of this stuff to ignore.

can you watch this season without having watched The Defenders?

i'll get around to it eventually i guess

weird how quickly these things ran out of steam, huh? just way too little story for so many episodes in most cases

yeah, and it was immediately obvious even from DD s1

can you watch this season without having watched The Defenders?

― dan selzer, Friday, November 9, 2018 10:01 AM (eleven minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

Yeah, as long as you know that everyone thought DD was killed by a collapsing building at the end of that series (he was not actually killed, so sorry 2 spoil), there aren't really any other strong ties.

If nothing else, I'd recommend y'all check out the fight scene alluded to by Ned upthread. It's a dope long take (something like 11-12 minutes) of Matt trying to escape a prison riot that they must've spent forever rehearsing in order to make it look like such an unstructured brawl.

The bulk of one of the late season episodes is a flashback to Karen's pre-DD days in her small Vermont town which goes a long way towards explaining why she seems so goddamn haunted all the time, basically like a little indie film casually dropped into the mix. YMMV as to whether that sounds at all appealing.

(Also this is probably a good place to once again express my surprise in discovering that Cloak and Dagger is actually, imo, at least as good as the best of the Netflix shows.)

yeah the only one of these shows I got into at all was Luke Cage but everything good about that show should've been compressed into a couple tight 8 or 10-episode seasons

i really enjoyed s3 of this tbh

punisher and dd are probably the only good superhero tv shows, and better than a lot of superhero movies

I appreciate how consistently oppressive it's been with the sense that Fisk controls every goddamn piece on the board and, with two episodes to go, there's no clear path for DD & co. to come out on top.

Also appreciate how Matt has mostly just been getting the shit kicked out of him all season with very little that might be considered a win.

I've loved all 3 seasons of DD. Actress playing Karen still the weak link for me (I skipped her solo episode) but otherwise one of the best superhero adaptations, IMHO.

they're good there's just way too much TV and that goes double for superhero stuff. I loved Legion and never even watched S2 of that

I'm about halfway through S3 and really enjoying it so far. Defenders kinda killed my interest in the whole Marvel Netflix thing (didn't bother with Iron Fist) but I'm glad I jumped back in. I completely forgot they even made Punisher until just now!

I watched series 3 about a month ago and enjoyed it. I thought I was coming to it late so surprised that it seems most people are watching it now.
MIght go back and watch the rest of Cloak & Dagger which i got several episodes into. Think other things turned up at the same time or something.