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hells_half_acreI was housesitting this weekend for a friend who has Netflix, so I was able to marathon the last six episodes of Daredevil Season 1.
It's a good show!
Before I go into it though, I should say that I have never read the Daredevil comics and don't know that much about the character beyond the basics of "Daredevil is blind, has super senses, and works as a lawyer by day. His enemy is named Kingpin."
[I also watched that Ben Affleck movie back when it came out and thought it sucked (made worse by the fact that I watched a bootleg theatre-recording of it, so half of the fight scenes I couldn't see because it was too damn dark.) Anyway, needless to say, the movie didn't make much of an impression. Was Elektra in it? She was - I just looked it up. Like I said, not much of an impression.]
Anyway, let's talk about the new Daredevil Netflix show:
Things I liked:
- The acting/casting is amazing. Everyone knocked it out of the park.
- I really liked Rosario Dawson's character, Claire, and I was super worried that they were going to fridge her - I'm so glad they didn't.
- That fight scene, the one-take hallway fight scene, was some of the best damn work I've ever seen on both TV and in the movies. Actually, I really don't think I've ever seen anything like it before at all. It was so amazing.
- Someone on tumblr said this, but I'm going to echo it - I like that the men can cry on the show. You never know how unrealistically stoic every other guy in the media is until you see people actually acting normal. Normal people start ugly crying when they're fighting with their best friends.... normal people start weeping when they've gone on a drinking binge because someone they loved died. I just loved it. It made the characters seem real. It made me empathize with them more.
- Someone else said, and I agree - that Daredevil is basically the story of one man's fight against gentrification. I think it's pretty awesome for that reason too. (I thought it was Aaron Diaz who said it on twitter, but I can't find it now, so who knows.)
- Now, listen, I'm an athiest and I actually kind of distrust/dislike organized religion - but I really enjoyed the fact that Matt's catholicism was part of the framework of the story, and I liked the fact that religion is important to Matt and is a guiding force behind his actions/moral-conflict.
- Similarly, I liked how bringing down the bad guys = bringing them to justice, rather than killing them. I know there's far more satisfaction in killng them, for me anyway, but I guess it's kinda part of the reason that I enjoy Captain America too... sometimes I want my heroes to be better people than I am. (I don't mean to imply that Captain America doesn't kill people, because he obviously does, but he's better than me in other ways.)
- I love that Daredevil as a story is SO LOCALIZED. It's not about New York, it's about a TINY PART of New York. And it actually manages to take the smal scale and make it epic... a lot of superhero stories go big to make it epic. They make the fate of the whole world hang in the balance. Ultron is going to wipe out all of humanity, Loki is going to subjugate all of humanity, Hydra is going to kill millions of people all over the world, etc... Daredevil is just like "Hey, stop kicking people out of their crappy apartments over on 53th St., or I'm going to fuck you up!" It's awesome! I mean, I realize they set up a lot of stuff that might make it bigger later - Stick and his "war" and such, but we'll cross that bridge if/when we come to it.
- Languages... I loved that they had people speaking their native-tongues. I loved that they didn't make everyone speak accented english, like that was the only option. I also loved how they didn't always translate it... basically, they'd only translate it when it was clear that everyone in the scene understood the language and no one needed it translated through another character. If there was another character translating, then they translated for the audience as well, and we didn't get to know what was truly said.
What I didn't like:
- This is more a personal prefence thing.... but I don't care about villains. I recognize that they did a beautiful job setting up the parallels between Matt and Fisk, about how they both claimed to be trying to save Hell's Kitchen - one through preservation and one through gentrification. And it WAS well done and it WAS a cool parallel. I'm not denying that.... I'm just saying that I sat through all of Fisk's storylines with my editing fingers itching to remove them, to give myself only the hero's story - to NOT KNOW MORE THAN THE HERO DID. It's a preference on my part, I figure, for mystery....
I'm reading a series of books right now, written for young adults, called Alpha Force, and they're really great fun books - basically classic Mission Impossible but with teenagers. Anyway, there's always a chapter where everything goes right and then a chapter where everything goes wrong, and then the rest of the chapters are them trying to fix the situation or escape it or what have you. At the end of the chapter where everything goes right though, there's always a sentence along the lines of "If they had known what was to come, they would have made a different decision" - and I hate that f*cking sentence. I don't want to know! I want to be just as shocked as the heroes are when everything goes to shit in the next chapter. I don't want to be anticipating it beyond knowing that things need to go to shit for there to be a story for the rest fo the book.
So, yeah, as much as Vincent D'onofrio is a good actor and did a great job. I didn't care about Wilson Fisk/Kingpin and I didn't want to know about his dating troubles or his backstory. ("cool motive, still murder.")
That being said, if I DID re-edit the show - I would be sad to lose that last Fisk/Wesley scene, because it was pretty gorgeous and heartbreaking.
- The violence was, at times, too brutal for me, especially when Fisk kills the Russian.... I couldn't watch the show for a couple more days after that.
To Sum Up: Good show! But brutal. And, due solely to a personality-quirk of mine, if I were to rewatch it - it would be an edited version.
It's a good show!
Before I go into it though, I should say that I have never read the Daredevil comics and don't know that much about the character beyond the basics of "Daredevil is blind, has super senses, and works as a lawyer by day. His enemy is named Kingpin."
[I also watched that Ben Affleck movie back when it came out and thought it sucked (made worse by the fact that I watched a bootleg theatre-recording of it, so half of the fight scenes I couldn't see because it was too damn dark.) Anyway, needless to say, the movie didn't make much of an impression. Was Elektra in it? She was - I just looked it up. Like I said, not much of an impression.]
Anyway, let's talk about the new Daredevil Netflix show:
Things I liked:
- The acting/casting is amazing. Everyone knocked it out of the park.
- I really liked Rosario Dawson's character, Claire, and I was super worried that they were going to fridge her - I'm so glad they didn't.
- That fight scene, the one-take hallway fight scene, was some of the best damn work I've ever seen on both TV and in the movies. Actually, I really don't think I've ever seen anything like it before at all. It was so amazing.
- Someone on tumblr said this, but I'm going to echo it - I like that the men can cry on the show. You never know how unrealistically stoic every other guy in the media is until you see people actually acting normal. Normal people start ugly crying when they're fighting with their best friends.... normal people start weeping when they've gone on a drinking binge because someone they loved died. I just loved it. It made the characters seem real. It made me empathize with them more.
- Someone else said, and I agree - that Daredevil is basically the story of one man's fight against gentrification. I think it's pretty awesome for that reason too. (I thought it was Aaron Diaz who said it on twitter, but I can't find it now, so who knows.)
- Now, listen, I'm an athiest and I actually kind of distrust/dislike organized religion - but I really enjoyed the fact that Matt's catholicism was part of the framework of the story, and I liked the fact that religion is important to Matt and is a guiding force behind his actions/moral-conflict.
- Similarly, I liked how bringing down the bad guys = bringing them to justice, rather than killing them. I know there's far more satisfaction in killng them, for me anyway, but I guess it's kinda part of the reason that I enjoy Captain America too... sometimes I want my heroes to be better people than I am. (I don't mean to imply that Captain America doesn't kill people, because he obviously does, but he's better than me in other ways.)
- I love that Daredevil as a story is SO LOCALIZED. It's not about New York, it's about a TINY PART of New York. And it actually manages to take the smal scale and make it epic... a lot of superhero stories go big to make it epic. They make the fate of the whole world hang in the balance. Ultron is going to wipe out all of humanity, Loki is going to subjugate all of humanity, Hydra is going to kill millions of people all over the world, etc... Daredevil is just like "Hey, stop kicking people out of their crappy apartments over on 53th St., or I'm going to fuck you up!" It's awesome! I mean, I realize they set up a lot of stuff that might make it bigger later - Stick and his "war" and such, but we'll cross that bridge if/when we come to it.
- Languages... I loved that they had people speaking their native-tongues. I loved that they didn't make everyone speak accented english, like that was the only option. I also loved how they didn't always translate it... basically, they'd only translate it when it was clear that everyone in the scene understood the language and no one needed it translated through another character. If there was another character translating, then they translated for the audience as well, and we didn't get to know what was truly said.
What I didn't like:
- This is more a personal prefence thing.... but I don't care about villains. I recognize that they did a beautiful job setting up the parallels between Matt and Fisk, about how they both claimed to be trying to save Hell's Kitchen - one through preservation and one through gentrification. And it WAS well done and it WAS a cool parallel. I'm not denying that.... I'm just saying that I sat through all of Fisk's storylines with my editing fingers itching to remove them, to give myself only the hero's story - to NOT KNOW MORE THAN THE HERO DID. It's a preference on my part, I figure, for mystery....
I'm reading a series of books right now, written for young adults, called Alpha Force, and they're really great fun books - basically classic Mission Impossible but with teenagers. Anyway, there's always a chapter where everything goes right and then a chapter where everything goes wrong, and then the rest of the chapters are them trying to fix the situation or escape it or what have you. At the end of the chapter where everything goes right though, there's always a sentence along the lines of "If they had known what was to come, they would have made a different decision" - and I hate that f*cking sentence. I don't want to know! I want to be just as shocked as the heroes are when everything goes to shit in the next chapter. I don't want to be anticipating it beyond knowing that things need to go to shit for there to be a story for the rest fo the book.
So, yeah, as much as Vincent D'onofrio is a good actor and did a great job. I didn't care about Wilson Fisk/Kingpin and I didn't want to know about his dating troubles or his backstory. ("cool motive, still murder.")
That being said, if I DID re-edit the show - I would be sad to lose that last Fisk/Wesley scene, because it was pretty gorgeous and heartbreaking.
- The violence was, at times, too brutal for me, especially when Fisk kills the Russian.... I couldn't watch the show for a couple more days after that.
To Sum Up: Good show! But brutal. And, due solely to a personality-quirk of mine, if I were to rewatch it - it would be an edited version.
