Radio, Radio: Multiversal Exports

The contemporaneous cape-flicks Spider-Man: Across the Spider-Verse and The Flash are both riffing on a lot of the same ideas. I put together a fun radio piece asking if the concept of fictional multiverses has gone fully mainstream. it aired today on Here & Now, but you can listen right here.

"The Flash": You Will Believe a Man Can McFly

Ezra Miller and Sasha Calle in The Flash. (Courtesy of Warner Bros. Pictures/™ & © DC Comics)

Before Guardians of the Galaxy auteur James Gunn comes in to start the whole DC Comics movie project over again, they’ve one movie left in the can, and it’s The Flash. Specific is multiversal, the saying goes. My Washington City Paper review is here.

You Got to Have a Mother Box For Me: Justice League, reviewed.

How Green Was My Screen: JK Simmons, Gal Gadot, Ray Fisher, Ben Affleck, and Ezra Miller (Warner Bros.).

Early in Justice League, while director Zack Snyder abuses yet another Leonard Cohen song, we see a glimpse of a Metropolis Post front page with a headline about vanished heroes that puts Kal-El in the middle of a triptych with Prince and David Bowie. It feels like a joke from Men in Black (another comic book-derived movie) 20 years ago. Anyway, it's good to see that Metropolis is still a two-paper town.

Here's my review of Justice League, where I did not really have room to complain that J.K. Simmons, the J. Jonah Jameson of Sam Raimi's no-longer-canonical Spider-Man trilogy, is now Commissioner Gordon, which feels like double-dipping, or that Gordon has once again been demoted to empty trenchcoat after being a vibrant, fully-developed character in Christopher Nolan's no-longer-canonical Dark Knight trilogy. These movies, man.