What's Your Fantasy??? (Wonder Woman Edition)
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some of these chics shouldn't have been allowed to leave the costume shop
I see this bitch I'll carry her back to the crib just like this
hell yea, that ass look great!
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Lynda Carter Comments on Wonder Woman’s ‘Batman V Superman’ Costume
It’s odd that even after all these years of superhero blockbusters, a hero or heroine’s costume can still be the biggest symbol of what direction a film will take – or the exact opposite. An audience’s first look at a superhero suit is always certain to draw mixed reactions, but in the case of Wonder Woman, casual and diehard fans alike took their time to process Gal Gadot’s new outfit when it was revealed at Comic Con 2014.
Gadot’s casting may have been deemed ‘controversial,’ but the costume itself received a surprisingly warm reception. But the lack of the classic red, white and blue color scheme isn’t lost on former Wonder Woman star Lynda Carter. However, her reservations point to one fact that should be clear by now: the Wonder Woman of Zack Snyder’s Batman V Superman is no longer just an ‘American’ icon.
The lack of any outrage or controversy surrounding the first image of Gadot in costume may be partly due to the fact that there aren’t other examples for fans to compare – aside from the one made famous on television by Lynda Carter. As one of the few women to play the role of Diana in live-action, Carter’s opinion of Gadot was understandably sought not long after her casting was announced.
The actress seemed pleased to hear that anyone was getting the chance to don the tiara and lasso on film, but with the suit revealed, Access Hollywood asked for her initial reaction to Diana’s new duds:
“Well, I was missing the red, white and blue, I have to say… I don’t know. I haven’t seen it yet, so I really can’t comment. Maybe there’s a lot more color in it than what we saw in the picture.”
Those sentiments have been expressed by plenty, with Zack Snyder’s love of releasing monochrome or stylized images of his principal cast maintaining suspense (and for some, concerns). While it’s safe to assume that Wonder Woman’s costume will be more colorful than the first image, it’s all but confirmed that the primary color scheme of the past has been cast aside.
That might come as a disappointment to those who view the comic book version – or Carter’s – as the ‘true’ look of the character. But there’s good reason for the lack of the “red, white and blue” noted by Carter, and it stretches far beyond the cosmetic.
Take a look, if you will, at the costume worn by Carter in the 1970s, and see if a certain… national identity is being subtly hinted at:
For us, the fact that Zack Snyder wasn’t interested in bringing an all-American Wonder Woman to his film universe was made abundantly clear when he cast an Israeli-born actress in the role. The idea of a Wonder Woman who wasn’t light-skinned, blue-eyed, or American was problematic for many, but the most common explanation heard for why Batman V Superman‘s Diana wouldn’t be played by an American was a simple one: Wonder Woman isn’t American to begin with.
Snyder isn’t alone in that belief either, as DC Comics has also implemented a similar shift away from the character’s classic depiction. Although Diana was first introduced with a golden eagle on her chest, and wrapped in the American flag, the Wonder Woman on comic stands today has shed much of that imagery.
Although comic book superheroes have risen to the level of “American myths” (according to star Ben Affleck) the idea of nationality or ‘jurisdiction’ in superhero fiction has drastically changed. As globalization and technology have shrunk the world, the idea of bona fide ‘superheroes’ protecting their home states has ended. And if Wonder Woman is expected to take issue with the struggles of women in a male-dominated world, America doesn’t have a monopoly on the problem.
Although Clark Kent may always possess the values of a Kansas farmboy (as he explains at Man of Steel‘s close, he’s “about as American as you can get”), ideas of nationality or citizenship is complicated when you can cross an ocean in minutes – and didn’t come from Earth in the first place. But it’s been years since comic writers and artists realized that an American identity for Diana doesn’t make much sense. It seems Snyder simply agrees.
Eager to point out the more important issue, Carter went on to explain that Gadot and her colleagues have bigger challenges than what message is sent by their character’s costume:
“It’s almost impossible to play a superhero anyway. You can’t. You just have to play a character that happens to do these amazing things. That’s the only way you can do it. And the costumes all take care of themselves.”
“I’ll have to wait and see. I hate to comment on something that I haven’t seen and I’m very supportive of Gal Gadot. I’m very supportive of them doing Wonder Woman, putting her in any capacity. I think she needs to be out there. … It’s high time somebody took a chance and did it and so I’m really happy about that.”
“I’ll have to wait and see. I hate to comment on something that I haven’t seen and I’m very supportive of Gal Gadot. I’m very supportive of them doing Wonder Woman, putting her in any capacity. I think she needs to be out there. … It’s high time somebody took a chance and did it and so I’m really happy about that.”
We tend to agree; it’s far better to hear fans debate the color or design of Wonder Woman’s movie costume than it is to wonder when people will ever get to see it. What do you think of Snyder’s step away from portraying Wonder Woman as an ‘American’ icon? Is Wonder Woman a heroine for every country, or do you have your concerns?
Lynda Carter: The Wonder Woman movie needs the female perspective
Monday, news broke that Michelle MacLaren will no longer direct Wonder Woman, which stars Gal Gadot and is slated for a 2017 release.
Less than 24 hours later, Lynda Carter, who played Diana Prince (a.k.a. Wonder Woman) in the 1970s TV series, caught up with Jessica Shaw and Sara Vilkomerson on EW Radio’s “Inside TV.”
In an interview clip, Carter said she’s excited to see the story of Wonder Woman continue on, and added that the film, director or otherwise, needs the female perspective. Could Carter become involved herself?
“I would love to be involved in a creative position of it,” Carter said. “I know so much about what people want from it, I think, that just being as a consultant on a movie. I think it needs a woman.” She explained that women understand women.
Carter said she hasn’t talked to the studio about any kind of involvement in the film, but she may. And as for onscreen time, Carter is open to the idea of playing a role—but would prefer it be something more than a cameo.
For more, listen to the clip below.
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Monday, news broke that Michelle MacLaren will no longer direct Wonder Woman, which stars Gal Gadot and is slated for a 2017 release.
Less than 24 hours later, Lynda Carter, who played Diana Prince (a.k.a. Wonder Woman) in the 1970s TV series, caught up with Jessica Shaw and Sara Vilkomerson on EW Radio’s “Inside TV.”
In an interview clip, Carter said she’s excited to see the story of Wonder Woman continue on, and added that the film, director or otherwise, needs the female perspective. Could Carter become involved herself?
“I would love to be involved in a creative position of it,” Carter said. “I know so much about what people want from it, I think, that just being as a consultant on a movie. I think it needs a woman.” She explained that women understand women.
Carter said she hasn’t talked to the studio about any kind of involvement in the film, but she may. And as for onscreen time, Carter is open to the idea of playing a role—but would prefer it be something more than a cameo.
For more, listen to the clip below.
<iframe width="100%" height="450" scrolling="no" frameborder="no" src="https://w.soundcloud.com/player/?url=https%3A//api.soundcloud.com/tracks/200806761&auto_play=false&hide_related=false&show_comments=true&show_user=true&show_reposts=false&visual=true"></iframe>
Wondering Woman: Why Warner Bros. Axed Michelle MacLaren, and What That Tells Us About the State of Female Directors in Hollywood
On April 13, Warner Bros. announced that Michelle MacLaren, the director it had hired to bring Wonder Woman to the screen, had left the project due to “creative differences.” This was disappointing, and not just because “creative differences” is one of those crisis-management terms that, like “conscious uncoupling” or “corporate rightsizing,” seems to be constructed out of so much aerated bullshit that it almost doesn’t matter that somewhere within it is sometimes a kernel of actual truth. When the news broke, Twitter erupted, a phrase we should probably retire since erupting is more or less Twitter’s permanent condition; as a social network, it is essentially a teenager’s forehead.
In this case, the distress and noise were understandable. MacLaren, after all, was going to be the first woman to break into the all-male This Is Our Gigantic 12-Part Plan To Make Nothing But Comic-Book Movies Forever business model. And although Wonder Woman would have been her first feature, she pretty clearly earned it by directing some of the most visually dynamic and narratively taut episodes of Breaking Bad, The Walking Dead, and Game of Thrones — work that had won her not just two Emmy nominations but notice from critics, a rarity for a medium in which writers, not directors, are the stars. She was going to bring sharpness and maturity and sensibility to a category that too often smells like Axe.
One day after the departure became public — and after rumors started flying that Angelina Jolie was being courted by both DC (to direct Wonder Woman) and Marvel (to direct Captain Marvel) — Warner Bros. announced MacLaren’s replacement: Patty Jenkins, who directed Charlize Theron to an Oscar for Monster and who, though not a veteran of superhero movies, is, perhaps more importantly, a veteran of “creative differences” over superhero movies.
When Jenkins left Thor 2 in late 2011 because of you guessed it, she was replaced by a man, Alan Taylor, and nobody kicked up much of a fuss. But things move forward, and this time, there would have been a fuss. The most generous possible reading of Warner Bros.’s decision to replace MacLaren with Jenkins is that it looked for the best possible director for Wonder Woman and found her. The second-most generous reading is that the studio looked for the best possible woman to direct Wonder Woman, because it thought a woman would be better for the job. The least generous reading is that Warner Bros. would have been happy to hire a man to replace MacLaren but didn’t want the public grief it knew it would get, so it grimly, grudgingly, sourly realized that, uh-oh, better hire a woman, because, you know, everybody’s so touchy these days.
That would be a cynical, unpleasant, contemptibly motivated rationale. It would also be progress. When it comes to gender, male-dominated corporations do the wrong thing for the wrong reasons all the time. So doing the right thing for the wrong reasons is a step forward. And if merit has anything to do with anything, we’ll soon hear that MacLaren is in the director’s chair on another feature — maybe even one that doesn’t require her primary job to be the propping-up of an out-of-fashion character being used as a rope bridge to get moviegoers from one movie with Batman and Superman to the next.
I’m being glass-half-full here because the news about Wonder Woman was pretty much all cloud, no silver lining. If you care about movies and how they are made, the trade stories about this project probably confirmed every suspicion you might have about the horrifically dispiriting way these movies are conceived. I use the word “movie” reluctantly because right now, Wonder Woman is certainly not one: It is a release date (June 23, 2017), and it is a promise to stockholders (as the third of 10 upcoming connected DC Universe films that are meant, between 2016 and 2020, to show that DC can play on Marvel’s field), and it is a recognizable — albeit dusty — title. Right now, that’s all it is. It’s certainly not a movie in the sense of being an entertainment product that starts with an idea and then results in a script that is good enough to attract a director and stars.
We know Wonder Woman isn’t that kind of movie based on what has been reported, none of which has been refuted by anyone involved. From The Hollywood Reporter, we learned that MacLaren “had been heavily involved in shaping … scripts” by “various writers” of the project. (Note: scripts, not script.) From Variety came the madcap bit of doublespeak that Warner Bros. was “concerned about MacLaren directing a large-scale, action-packed production,” because she hadn’t directed any action (except, of course, for all the action she had directed on all the shows that got her the job in the first place). But we also learned that maybe Warner Bros. didn’t want Wonder Woman to be an action movie but rather “a character-driven story that was less heavy on action,” in which case, maybe it didn’t hire MacLaren to do the action movie it didn’t want and thought she couldn’t direct. Meanwhile, however, those “various scripts” allowing the studio to “simultaneously test story concepts” were actively happening.1
To translate all of that into English: Since studio development executives are now asked to be property managers rather than movie developers, not many of them are capable of sitting down and talking about what a story should be. And none of them wants to risk his neck by committing early to the wrong choice. So, like many modern-day blockbusters, Wonder Woman will be developed via the monkeys-at-typewriters approach: Let’s have a bunch of different people write different Wonder Woman scripts, pick the parts that we sort of like better than the others, proceed to humiliate the “winning” writers by asking them to interpolate the stuff from the “losing” scripts that we also kind of liked, let the WGA work out the credits and mop up the blood and tears, sew everything together, and sell the resulting Frankenmovie to an audience we will have programmed (via an incessant drumbeat of teasers, trailers, and post-credit sequences) to show up for whatever this thing turns out to be.
That certainly sounds like every writer and director’s dream.
♦♦♦
This is not an anti-comic-book-movie rant. There is a way to make these movies well, as evidenced by the fact that some of them are good. Ass-backwardness is a bad habit, not a requirement. To my taste, the most enjoyable recent comic-book movie was last year’s Captain America: The Winter Soldier. It was written by two guys, Christopher Markus and Stephen McFeely, who, not coincidentally, were the same two guys who wrote the first Captain America movie. According to interviews with the writers, they batted around ideas soon after the original Captain America came out, ran with their fondness for 1970s conspiracy thrillers like The Parallax View and Three Days of the Condor, came up with a story line that threaded their DNA into the comic-book genre without bending it too far out of shape, pitched it to Marvel, got it approved, and wrote it. The resulting movie was entertaining, as many of these movies are, but it was also tonally coherent, as few of these movies are, and did not reek of the denatured compromise that suggests the heavy hand of too many corporate cooks, as most of these movies do. Process still counts; that movie planning now operates in five-year cycles driven by brand management, tie-ins, and the imperatives of the international marketplace does not, it turns out, mean you can’t make movies the old-fashioned way. You can — even if they’re Products of the Age of Ultron and Beyond.
A few months ago in this space, I unloaded an ever-so-slightly gloomy (OK, apocalyptic-ish) set of thoughts about where the movie business is headed. I would like to update that to say this: We’re there. In eight days, Joss Whedon’s new Avengers movie will open. I hope it’s good — as comic-book-movie history teaches us, Part 2s, freed of the burdens of origin stories and character introductions, are often better than Part 1s.2 Nonetheless, Avengers: Age of Ultron is also the first of these movies to open since DC and Marvel announced their competing engulf-and-devour plans last year, so I’d sort of been marking its arrival in my mind as the beginning — the new dawn of how things are going to be.
But it turns out I’d been staring so intently at the horizon that I forgot to look behind me. That new dawn already dawned. It happened three weeks ago with the arrival of Furious 7, a movie that in 17 days of release has grossed $1.15 billion worldwide, making it the seventh-highest-grossing movie in history.
In every way but the strictly technical absence of a comic book to serve as its basis, Furious 7 is a comic-book movie, and it is also an emblem of the new incoherence. There is, of course, a tragic circumstance behind it — the death of Paul Walker 17 months ago midway through the film’s production, which necessitated a months-long hiatus, a major rewrite, and no small amount of technological trickery involving Walker’s face being CGI’ed onto the bodies of stunt doubles and/or his own brothers. These scenes in the movie are, I think, pretty apparent (and it’s very hard not to look for them), and they are awkward. But it would be dishonest to suggest that they are, in any jarring way, out of sync with the approach of the rest of the film, which is entirely about grafting one thing to another in the committed belief that it doesn’t need to make sense, it just needs to move.
Furious 7 is an amalgam of many things. Here is the ingredient list: the action set pieces that, rather than “story,” are its reason for being and thus reportedly the first things to be conceived. The 50 or so trailer-ready lines that Vin Diesel is given to lay on us in his deliberate, syllable-by-syllable monotone, the point of each of which is not to mean anything but to provide a rhythmic transitional BOOM! that takes you into the next scene. Brazenly noisy product placement (this sentence has been brought to you by Corona). Bizarre fan service (in one sore thumb of a scene set in Tokyo, the movie rounds out the retconning of the third movie in the series, which now apparently takes place between 6 and 7). God knows what tax breaks or cofinancing deals or financial incentives, all beyond our sight lines, basically made China (from which almost a quarter of the movie’s gross revenue has come) a coproducer and Abu Dhabi the recipient of what amounts to a long tourism ad. Women’s ornamentally jiggling asses and thong-protected cracks (but all in a tasteful SI swimsuit issue PG-13 way!). Fistfights any five seconds of which, in real life, would kill you, presumably performed by large and patient bald stuntmen. Bro sentimentality served up by the 55-gallon drum. And car crashes mysteriously free of fireballs (which would trigger upsetting associations for moviegoers) or consequences (which would relate to laws of physics and/or human vulnerability, any acknowledgment of either of which would topple the whole house of cards instantly). Combine. Stir. Half-bake. Serve.
The Furious franchise — which its masters, or rather servants, at Universal hope goes at least three more movies — is now almost 14 years old, and at the end of Furious 7’s two hours of clamor it downshifts for a few minutes into a Paul Walker tribute and we see some clips from the early movies. They are shocking: They look ordinary, grubby, modest, human-size. Walker looks younger and blonder; Diesel looks smaller, lighter, less like foam rubber sprayed over lead. I was jolted by the reminder. The Fast & Furious franchise, notwithstanding the avalanche of hand-on-heart dudely commemoration that has greeted this installment, may never have been very good (effing awesome!!! is not the same thing), but it did start out, way back in 2001, as movies. Those movies are now steroidal Brand Edifices, and their journey from one thing to the other has been the journey of franchise films in the post-9/11 era. “It will probably win Best Picture at the Oscars, unless the Oscars don’t want to be relevant ever,” Diesel recently told Variety, speaking of the installment now in theaters. “There is nothing that will ever come close to the power of this thing.” Was that bombast or ironic bombast? Was he being serious or funny? It’s always so hard to tell with him. And maybe it doesn’t matter, because in either case, he’s articulating a reality: The Esthetic of Embiggening. It is here to drown out or roll over all dissent. And meanwhile, Michelle MacLaren is looking for a job.
On April 13, Warner Bros. announced that Michelle MacLaren, the director it had hired to bring Wonder Woman to the screen, had left the project due to “creative differences.” This was disappointing, and not just because “creative differences” is one of those crisis-management terms that, like “conscious uncoupling” or “corporate rightsizing,” seems to be constructed out of so much aerated bullshit that it almost doesn’t matter that somewhere within it is sometimes a kernel of actual truth. When the news broke, Twitter erupted, a phrase we should probably retire since erupting is more or less Twitter’s permanent condition; as a social network, it is essentially a teenager’s forehead.
In this case, the distress and noise were understandable. MacLaren, after all, was going to be the first woman to break into the all-male This Is Our Gigantic 12-Part Plan To Make Nothing But Comic-Book Movies Forever business model. And although Wonder Woman would have been her first feature, she pretty clearly earned it by directing some of the most visually dynamic and narratively taut episodes of Breaking Bad, The Walking Dead, and Game of Thrones — work that had won her not just two Emmy nominations but notice from critics, a rarity for a medium in which writers, not directors, are the stars. She was going to bring sharpness and maturity and sensibility to a category that too often smells like Axe.
One day after the departure became public — and after rumors started flying that Angelina Jolie was being courted by both DC (to direct Wonder Woman) and Marvel (to direct Captain Marvel) — Warner Bros. announced MacLaren’s replacement: Patty Jenkins, who directed Charlize Theron to an Oscar for Monster and who, though not a veteran of superhero movies, is, perhaps more importantly, a veteran of “creative differences” over superhero movies.
When Jenkins left Thor 2 in late 2011 because of you guessed it, she was replaced by a man, Alan Taylor, and nobody kicked up much of a fuss. But things move forward, and this time, there would have been a fuss. The most generous possible reading of Warner Bros.’s decision to replace MacLaren with Jenkins is that it looked for the best possible director for Wonder Woman and found her. The second-most generous reading is that the studio looked for the best possible woman to direct Wonder Woman, because it thought a woman would be better for the job. The least generous reading is that Warner Bros. would have been happy to hire a man to replace MacLaren but didn’t want the public grief it knew it would get, so it grimly, grudgingly, sourly realized that, uh-oh, better hire a woman, because, you know, everybody’s so touchy these days.
That would be a cynical, unpleasant, contemptibly motivated rationale. It would also be progress. When it comes to gender, male-dominated corporations do the wrong thing for the wrong reasons all the time. So doing the right thing for the wrong reasons is a step forward. And if merit has anything to do with anything, we’ll soon hear that MacLaren is in the director’s chair on another feature — maybe even one that doesn’t require her primary job to be the propping-up of an out-of-fashion character being used as a rope bridge to get moviegoers from one movie with Batman and Superman to the next.
I’m being glass-half-full here because the news about Wonder Woman was pretty much all cloud, no silver lining. If you care about movies and how they are made, the trade stories about this project probably confirmed every suspicion you might have about the horrifically dispiriting way these movies are conceived. I use the word “movie” reluctantly because right now, Wonder Woman is certainly not one: It is a release date (June 23, 2017), and it is a promise to stockholders (as the third of 10 upcoming connected DC Universe films that are meant, between 2016 and 2020, to show that DC can play on Marvel’s field), and it is a recognizable — albeit dusty — title. Right now, that’s all it is. It’s certainly not a movie in the sense of being an entertainment product that starts with an idea and then results in a script that is good enough to attract a director and stars.
We know Wonder Woman isn’t that kind of movie based on what has been reported, none of which has been refuted by anyone involved. From The Hollywood Reporter, we learned that MacLaren “had been heavily involved in shaping … scripts” by “various writers” of the project. (Note: scripts, not script.) From Variety came the madcap bit of doublespeak that Warner Bros. was “concerned about MacLaren directing a large-scale, action-packed production,” because she hadn’t directed any action (except, of course, for all the action she had directed on all the shows that got her the job in the first place). But we also learned that maybe Warner Bros. didn’t want Wonder Woman to be an action movie but rather “a character-driven story that was less heavy on action,” in which case, maybe it didn’t hire MacLaren to do the action movie it didn’t want and thought she couldn’t direct. Meanwhile, however, those “various scripts” allowing the studio to “simultaneously test story concepts” were actively happening.1
To translate all of that into English: Since studio development executives are now asked to be property managers rather than movie developers, not many of them are capable of sitting down and talking about what a story should be. And none of them wants to risk his neck by committing early to the wrong choice. So, like many modern-day blockbusters, Wonder Woman will be developed via the monkeys-at-typewriters approach: Let’s have a bunch of different people write different Wonder Woman scripts, pick the parts that we sort of like better than the others, proceed to humiliate the “winning” writers by asking them to interpolate the stuff from the “losing” scripts that we also kind of liked, let the WGA work out the credits and mop up the blood and tears, sew everything together, and sell the resulting Frankenmovie to an audience we will have programmed (via an incessant drumbeat of teasers, trailers, and post-credit sequences) to show up for whatever this thing turns out to be.
That certainly sounds like every writer and director’s dream.
♦♦♦
This is not an anti-comic-book-movie rant. There is a way to make these movies well, as evidenced by the fact that some of them are good. Ass-backwardness is a bad habit, not a requirement. To my taste, the most enjoyable recent comic-book movie was last year’s Captain America: The Winter Soldier. It was written by two guys, Christopher Markus and Stephen McFeely, who, not coincidentally, were the same two guys who wrote the first Captain America movie. According to interviews with the writers, they batted around ideas soon after the original Captain America came out, ran with their fondness for 1970s conspiracy thrillers like The Parallax View and Three Days of the Condor, came up with a story line that threaded their DNA into the comic-book genre without bending it too far out of shape, pitched it to Marvel, got it approved, and wrote it. The resulting movie was entertaining, as many of these movies are, but it was also tonally coherent, as few of these movies are, and did not reek of the denatured compromise that suggests the heavy hand of too many corporate cooks, as most of these movies do. Process still counts; that movie planning now operates in five-year cycles driven by brand management, tie-ins, and the imperatives of the international marketplace does not, it turns out, mean you can’t make movies the old-fashioned way. You can — even if they’re Products of the Age of Ultron and Beyond.
A few months ago in this space, I unloaded an ever-so-slightly gloomy (OK, apocalyptic-ish) set of thoughts about where the movie business is headed. I would like to update that to say this: We’re there. In eight days, Joss Whedon’s new Avengers movie will open. I hope it’s good — as comic-book-movie history teaches us, Part 2s, freed of the burdens of origin stories and character introductions, are often better than Part 1s.2 Nonetheless, Avengers: Age of Ultron is also the first of these movies to open since DC and Marvel announced their competing engulf-and-devour plans last year, so I’d sort of been marking its arrival in my mind as the beginning — the new dawn of how things are going to be.
But it turns out I’d been staring so intently at the horizon that I forgot to look behind me. That new dawn already dawned. It happened three weeks ago with the arrival of Furious 7, a movie that in 17 days of release has grossed $1.15 billion worldwide, making it the seventh-highest-grossing movie in history.
In every way but the strictly technical absence of a comic book to serve as its basis, Furious 7 is a comic-book movie, and it is also an emblem of the new incoherence. There is, of course, a tragic circumstance behind it — the death of Paul Walker 17 months ago midway through the film’s production, which necessitated a months-long hiatus, a major rewrite, and no small amount of technological trickery involving Walker’s face being CGI’ed onto the bodies of stunt doubles and/or his own brothers. These scenes in the movie are, I think, pretty apparent (and it’s very hard not to look for them), and they are awkward. But it would be dishonest to suggest that they are, in any jarring way, out of sync with the approach of the rest of the film, which is entirely about grafting one thing to another in the committed belief that it doesn’t need to make sense, it just needs to move.
Furious 7 is an amalgam of many things. Here is the ingredient list: the action set pieces that, rather than “story,” are its reason for being and thus reportedly the first things to be conceived. The 50 or so trailer-ready lines that Vin Diesel is given to lay on us in his deliberate, syllable-by-syllable monotone, the point of each of which is not to mean anything but to provide a rhythmic transitional BOOM! that takes you into the next scene. Brazenly noisy product placement (this sentence has been brought to you by Corona). Bizarre fan service (in one sore thumb of a scene set in Tokyo, the movie rounds out the retconning of the third movie in the series, which now apparently takes place between 6 and 7). God knows what tax breaks or cofinancing deals or financial incentives, all beyond our sight lines, basically made China (from which almost a quarter of the movie’s gross revenue has come) a coproducer and Abu Dhabi the recipient of what amounts to a long tourism ad. Women’s ornamentally jiggling asses and thong-protected cracks (but all in a tasteful SI swimsuit issue PG-13 way!). Fistfights any five seconds of which, in real life, would kill you, presumably performed by large and patient bald stuntmen. Bro sentimentality served up by the 55-gallon drum. And car crashes mysteriously free of fireballs (which would trigger upsetting associations for moviegoers) or consequences (which would relate to laws of physics and/or human vulnerability, any acknowledgment of either of which would topple the whole house of cards instantly). Combine. Stir. Half-bake. Serve.
The Furious franchise — which its masters, or rather servants, at Universal hope goes at least three more movies — is now almost 14 years old, and at the end of Furious 7’s two hours of clamor it downshifts for a few minutes into a Paul Walker tribute and we see some clips from the early movies. They are shocking: They look ordinary, grubby, modest, human-size. Walker looks younger and blonder; Diesel looks smaller, lighter, less like foam rubber sprayed over lead. I was jolted by the reminder. The Fast & Furious franchise, notwithstanding the avalanche of hand-on-heart dudely commemoration that has greeted this installment, may never have been very good (effing awesome!!! is not the same thing), but it did start out, way back in 2001, as movies. Those movies are now steroidal Brand Edifices, and their journey from one thing to the other has been the journey of franchise films in the post-9/11 era. “It will probably win Best Picture at the Oscars, unless the Oscars don’t want to be relevant ever,” Diesel recently told Variety, speaking of the installment now in theaters. “There is nothing that will ever come close to the power of this thing.” Was that bombast or ironic bombast? Was he being serious or funny? It’s always so hard to tell with him. And maybe it doesn’t matter, because in either case, he’s articulating a reality: The Esthetic of Embiggening. It is here to drown out or roll over all dissent. And meanwhile, Michelle MacLaren is looking for a job.
her daughter....
What Film and TV Adaptations Don’t Get About Wonder Woman
By Angelica Jade BastiénShare160Tweet0Share3Emailhere). Far too few writers carry on and update Marston’s vision of the character, choosing to present her as a generic warrior woman rather than a complex paragon of feminism.
Batman v. Superman: Dawn of Justice, out Friday,marks the first live-action, big-screen appearance of Wonder Woman (played by Gal Gadot) in the character’s 75-year existence. Let that sink in. Can Zack Snyder and David S. Goyer, two men who haven't had the best track record crafting women onscreen, to put it mildly, pull off introducing audiences to one of the most important female characters of all time? Wonder Woman’s appearance in Batman v. Superman, followed by the upcoming Wonder Woman, directed by Patty Jenkins, have to contend not only with the fact that her origin isn’t as widely known as her iconic peers’, but also with the negative myths about the character that have been used to explain why she hasn’t had successful adaptations. Here are just a few:
Wonder Woman doesn’t have any seminal stories. (Really? Hand themThe Hiketeia by Greg Rucka.) Her rogue’s gallery isn’t all that interesting. (See: Circe, Medusa, and Ares, all of whose myths have lasted the test of time.) Her definitive origin is too weird. Sure, a woman made from clay blessed by the gods and raised in an all-female society full of immortal Amazons is weird ... like every other great comic-book origin. It’s also much better than the new origin found in Brian Azzarello’s dramatic revamping of the character in 2011. Azzarello’s run isn’t the first time the character’s origin has been changed but it is undoubtedly the most radical, departing from the values Marston instilled. In Azzarello’s re-imagining, Wonder Woman finds out she’s really the daughter of Zeus (like he needs another kid), and the Amazons essentially rape sailors to populate Themyscira, and if they produce male children, they sell them for weaponry. In Azzarello’s hands, the Amazons are feminazi stereotypes. This change embodies the misogynist fear of female power, whereas Wonder Woman, at her best, embodies the celebration of it.
Batman v. Superman has the opportunity to do what no other Wonder Woman adaptation has: Give us a modern view of the character and prove to audiences she’s as interesting as her peers. As we prepare for the latest take on Wonder Woman, we’re revisiting the biggest appearances of the character in film and TV over the years, ranked from worst to best.
10. David E. Kelley’s Wonder Woman (2011)
Wonder Woman (2011 TV pilot) by kryptofreak
Being a Wonder Woman fan can sometimes feel like a study in masochism. If you watch enough of her adaptations you start to see patterns in the worst amongst them. While I can give the failures that occurred in the 1960s and '70s more of a pass considering that era didn’t have the same reverence for comic-book adaptations we currently do, I can’t do the same for David E. Kelley’s Wonder Woman pilot. There were signs early on that this adaptation was headed in a bad direction: Take the leaked script, which includes such egregious moments as Wonder Woman screaming to her underlings about her action figure and crying over her ex a lot, as well as a downright ugly take on her costume.
The pilot, which you can find the rough cut of above, embodies the patterns you see when creatives fail to understand Wonder Woman. Kelley’s Wonder Woman is divorced from the character’s defining traits, most glaringly her identity as an Amazon. Instead, she’s a crass CEO by day, lonely single woman by night. When she makes time for actually being a hero, she’s not that good at it, choosing to be a brutal vigilante instead of the empathetic warrior that Marston set out to create in 1941.
9. Who’s Afraid of Diana Prince? (1967)
Watching the few available minutes of Who’s Afraid of Diana Prince? goes a long way toward explaining why so many Wonder Woman adaptations never make it past the early stages. The pilot does away with pretty much everything that defines Wonder Woman. Who’s Afraid of Diana Prince?chooses to center around a housewife, the titular Diana, who may be going crazy because when she looks in the mirror she sees herself as Wonder Woman, who we’re not sure actually exists in the first place. It’s not only offensive but a downright bonkers change.
8. Wonder Woman (1974)
Wonder Woman fans are used to producers thinking the best way to adapt the character is by changing her from the ground up, which is exactly what this '70s TV movie does. Cathy Lee Crosby’s version is stripped ofeverything that makes the character iconic. She’s less a superhero and more a spy lacking any powers or even the traditional Wonder Woman costume. But it’s the choice to have her work as Steve Trevor’s assistant, helping take down people betraying the government, that proves to be the biggest miscalculation. What makes the last detail such a painful jab is that in the comics Trevor, who is Wonder Woman’s main love interest, often feels like a damsel in distress. Hopefully, Chris Pine’s take on the character in her upcoming solo film will adhere more to their dynamic in the comics, where she takes the lead.
7. Joss Whedon’s Wonder Woman (2006)
It’s hard to talk about Wonder Woman’s film history without mentioning Joss Whedon’s high-profile failed take on the character. (There are many near-misses in the character’s history, like George Miller’s Justice Leagueor Sandra Bullock being in talks to take on the character over a decade ago.) Whedon’s involvement seemed good in theory. But reading his script, you can feel his disinterest and disrespect for the character.
It’s hard to pick one line that illustrates why Whedon’s take fails. There’s the surprisingly casual misogyny, lack of sisterhood, and uncompelling main arc. But what makes this a bad Wonder Woman adaptation is how Whedon sets up Trevor teaching her what’s right and how the world should be, when it really should be the other way around.
Whedon has a thing for playing with the same character types over and over. Sometimes that creates magic (Buffy the Vampire Slayer), and, other times, it doesn’t quite come together (Dollhouse). Whedon tries throughout his story to make Wonder Woman fit the kind of woman he’s used to writing (more vulnerable, naïve girls with a penchant for pop-culture quips) but since that doesn’t exactly make sense for the character, she comes across as stilted and foolish. Many writers tend to do this: Grab onto one character trait from Wonder Woman (like her being a warrior) and throw out the rest, which is why she seems to lack the consistency of her peers. The adaptations that get Wonder Woman right are able to marry the various aspects of the character that have cropped up over her history in a way that updates her while respecting where she’s been.
6. Wonder Woman’s cameo in Batman: The Brave and the Bold(2011)
In the episode “Scorn of the Sapphire,” Batman: The Brave and the Boldevokes the kitschy fun of Lynda Carter’s definitive take on Wonder Woman (see No. 2), even using her show’s theme song. When Wonder Woman gives the villainous Baroness an ultimatum — “As a woman, you should know that the path of violence is a barren one. Abandon your misguided ways — join the sisterhood of peace” — we hear the hero’s main drive. But what I love about this appearance is how reliant Steve Trevor is on Wonder Woman. How can that man even function without her? Apparently, he probably can’t.
5. Batman/Superman: Apocalypse (2010)
Since becoming a diehard Wonder Woman fan I’ve learned that the best adaptations of the character are found in DC’s animated films. Despite the title, the main draw of Batman/Superman: Apocalypse is watching the Amazon princess fighting side-by-side with my other favorite badass from DC Comics: Big Barda. The highlight is their fight against the Female Furies: a military group raised by Granny Goodness, previously trained by Big Barda, and loyal to Darkseid, the power-mad ruler of their planet. Even though she isn’t given much of an arc in the film, we are able to see her among her Amazon sisters and to see why she is undoubtedly the best fighter and tactician in the DC universe.
4. Justice League: The New Frontier (2008)
The New Frontierincludes one of my favorite Wonder Woman scenes ever: Set in 1954 Indochina, Wonder Woman liberates a group of imprisoned women and lets them kill the men who raped them and brutalized their town. In this adaptation, Wonder Woman is taller than Superman and she doesn’t back down to him. Plus, she’s voiced by Lucy Lawless, who many, including myself, longed to see play Wonder Woman.The New Frontier illustrates exactly why Wonder Woman is an amazing character by highlighting her feminism and strong moral center.
3. Wonder Woman (2009)
When George Perez, Greg Potter, and Len Wein revamped Wonder Woman in 1987, they made several instrumental changes that have come to define the character ever since. They were able to embody the spirit of Marston’s ideas while making her feel modern and more powerful. Gone is the World War II setting that previously defined Wonder Woman. She gains more powers from the gods, including the ability to fly, super speed, resistance to fire, and enhanced senses, for starters. The Amazons are updated to be the reincarnations of women killed throughout history because of the brutality of men.
This brisk, animated Wonder Woman film smartly uses the Perez reboot as its foundation. The film, which is co-written by comic writer Gail Simone, covers many definitive points of her story: We watch Steve Trevor crash-land on Themyscira; Princess Diana takes on the mantle of Wonder Woman after disguising herself in order to win a contest among her peers; she ventures into Man’s World, broadening her horizons and acting as a symbol of peace. It also uses one of her central villains from the comics, who embodies everything she is against: Ares, the god of war.
There’s a lot to love about the film. Watching Wonder Woman learn about the world outside of her home; her banter with Trevor; and seeing her come into her own are a few highlights. But it’s the beautifully depicted relationship with her mother, Queen Hippolyta, that keeps me coming back to the film. Hippolyta and Wonder Woman have a complicated, loving relationship that highlights the feminism inherent to the hero. Their dynamic is refreshing because it is still so rare to see a major hero’s origin story focus on their interactions with their mother … or really any woman beyond whoever is getting killed off to make them more angsty.
2. Wonder Woman (1975–1977)
For most people, Lynda Carter is the most recognizable image of Wonder Woman. As much as I love Carter’s performance, it says a lot about DC Comics’ faith in Wonder Woman that this adaptation is not only the most well-known, despite how the character has evolved since, but the last successful translation of her in live-action. That isn’t to say Carter’s Wonder Woman isn’t amazing, because she definitely is. The show is wonderfully kitschy, heartfelt, and leans into the character’s origins. It also gives us a kind of hero we don’t see enough: the emotionally available type.
Carter predates Wonder Woman’s more expansive power set and, arguably, the character’s best stories. Yet there is a reason she remains the definitive version of Wonder Woman. She evokes the very ideals Marston set out to support when he created the character, and marked a feminist awakening for many, becoming a symbol for the feminist movement. But it’s not just politics that make this take great. It’s a truly fun, enchanting, weird show to watch. Carter’s Wonder Woman embodies every reason why audiences love the character: grace, compassion, with just the right amount of badassery.
1. Justice League (2001–2004) and Justice League Unlimited(2004–2006)
While I love Lynda Carter’s take on Wonder Woman, when I want to see consistently great stories about the character outside of the comics, I turn to the animated series Justice League, and its related counterpart that expands the cast, Justice League: Unlimited. The series streamlines her origin by making one important shift: It’s usually Steve Trevor’s crash landing that thrusts her into the world beyond Themyscira. Here, shechooses to take on the mantle of Wonder Woman, going against her mother’s wishes and traveling to Man’s World to help when a hero like her is needed most.
This highlights what makes Wonder Woman so different from her peers: It isn’t justice that primarily guides her, but a sense of empathy. In the series, we watch her deal with her identity as an Amazon, while her relationships with her mother and the rest of the Justice League evolve in fascinating ways — particularly her somewhat-romance with Batman (which Batman v Superman seems to be referencing in recent trailers).
Yes, we get to see her kick a lot of ass, deflect bullets, and use the lasso of truth inventively. But what makes this Wonder Woman a great hero is her kindness and intelligence. If Gal Gadot’s take on the character focuses on those traits instead of only playing up her role as a warrior, we will witness not only an adaptation that does Wonder Woman justice, but also a weirder, more dynamic superhero than film has had in a while.
By Angelica Jade BastiénShare160Tweet0Share3Emailhere). Far too few writers carry on and update Marston’s vision of the character, choosing to present her as a generic warrior woman rather than a complex paragon of feminism.
Batman v. Superman: Dawn of Justice, out Friday,marks the first live-action, big-screen appearance of Wonder Woman (played by Gal Gadot) in the character’s 75-year existence. Let that sink in. Can Zack Snyder and David S. Goyer, two men who haven't had the best track record crafting women onscreen, to put it mildly, pull off introducing audiences to one of the most important female characters of all time? Wonder Woman’s appearance in Batman v. Superman, followed by the upcoming Wonder Woman, directed by Patty Jenkins, have to contend not only with the fact that her origin isn’t as widely known as her iconic peers’, but also with the negative myths about the character that have been used to explain why she hasn’t had successful adaptations. Here are just a few:
Wonder Woman doesn’t have any seminal stories. (Really? Hand themThe Hiketeia by Greg Rucka.) Her rogue’s gallery isn’t all that interesting. (See: Circe, Medusa, and Ares, all of whose myths have lasted the test of time.) Her definitive origin is too weird. Sure, a woman made from clay blessed by the gods and raised in an all-female society full of immortal Amazons is weird ... like every other great comic-book origin. It’s also much better than the new origin found in Brian Azzarello’s dramatic revamping of the character in 2011. Azzarello’s run isn’t the first time the character’s origin has been changed but it is undoubtedly the most radical, departing from the values Marston instilled. In Azzarello’s re-imagining, Wonder Woman finds out she’s really the daughter of Zeus (like he needs another kid), and the Amazons essentially rape sailors to populate Themyscira, and if they produce male children, they sell them for weaponry. In Azzarello’s hands, the Amazons are feminazi stereotypes. This change embodies the misogynist fear of female power, whereas Wonder Woman, at her best, embodies the celebration of it.
Batman v. Superman has the opportunity to do what no other Wonder Woman adaptation has: Give us a modern view of the character and prove to audiences she’s as interesting as her peers. As we prepare for the latest take on Wonder Woman, we’re revisiting the biggest appearances of the character in film and TV over the years, ranked from worst to best.
10. David E. Kelley’s Wonder Woman (2011)
Wonder Woman (2011 TV pilot) by kryptofreak
Being a Wonder Woman fan can sometimes feel like a study in masochism. If you watch enough of her adaptations you start to see patterns in the worst amongst them. While I can give the failures that occurred in the 1960s and '70s more of a pass considering that era didn’t have the same reverence for comic-book adaptations we currently do, I can’t do the same for David E. Kelley’s Wonder Woman pilot. There were signs early on that this adaptation was headed in a bad direction: Take the leaked script, which includes such egregious moments as Wonder Woman screaming to her underlings about her action figure and crying over her ex a lot, as well as a downright ugly take on her costume.
The pilot, which you can find the rough cut of above, embodies the patterns you see when creatives fail to understand Wonder Woman. Kelley’s Wonder Woman is divorced from the character’s defining traits, most glaringly her identity as an Amazon. Instead, she’s a crass CEO by day, lonely single woman by night. When she makes time for actually being a hero, she’s not that good at it, choosing to be a brutal vigilante instead of the empathetic warrior that Marston set out to create in 1941.
9. Who’s Afraid of Diana Prince? (1967)
Watching the few available minutes of Who’s Afraid of Diana Prince? goes a long way toward explaining why so many Wonder Woman adaptations never make it past the early stages. The pilot does away with pretty much everything that defines Wonder Woman. Who’s Afraid of Diana Prince?chooses to center around a housewife, the titular Diana, who may be going crazy because when she looks in the mirror she sees herself as Wonder Woman, who we’re not sure actually exists in the first place. It’s not only offensive but a downright bonkers change.
8. Wonder Woman (1974)
Wonder Woman fans are used to producers thinking the best way to adapt the character is by changing her from the ground up, which is exactly what this '70s TV movie does. Cathy Lee Crosby’s version is stripped ofeverything that makes the character iconic. She’s less a superhero and more a spy lacking any powers or even the traditional Wonder Woman costume. But it’s the choice to have her work as Steve Trevor’s assistant, helping take down people betraying the government, that proves to be the biggest miscalculation. What makes the last detail such a painful jab is that in the comics Trevor, who is Wonder Woman’s main love interest, often feels like a damsel in distress. Hopefully, Chris Pine’s take on the character in her upcoming solo film will adhere more to their dynamic in the comics, where she takes the lead.
7. Joss Whedon’s Wonder Woman (2006)
It’s hard to talk about Wonder Woman’s film history without mentioning Joss Whedon’s high-profile failed take on the character. (There are many near-misses in the character’s history, like George Miller’s Justice Leagueor Sandra Bullock being in talks to take on the character over a decade ago.) Whedon’s involvement seemed good in theory. But reading his script, you can feel his disinterest and disrespect for the character.
It’s hard to pick one line that illustrates why Whedon’s take fails. There’s the surprisingly casual misogyny, lack of sisterhood, and uncompelling main arc. But what makes this a bad Wonder Woman adaptation is how Whedon sets up Trevor teaching her what’s right and how the world should be, when it really should be the other way around.
Whedon has a thing for playing with the same character types over and over. Sometimes that creates magic (Buffy the Vampire Slayer), and, other times, it doesn’t quite come together (Dollhouse). Whedon tries throughout his story to make Wonder Woman fit the kind of woman he’s used to writing (more vulnerable, naïve girls with a penchant for pop-culture quips) but since that doesn’t exactly make sense for the character, she comes across as stilted and foolish. Many writers tend to do this: Grab onto one character trait from Wonder Woman (like her being a warrior) and throw out the rest, which is why she seems to lack the consistency of her peers. The adaptations that get Wonder Woman right are able to marry the various aspects of the character that have cropped up over her history in a way that updates her while respecting where she’s been.
6. Wonder Woman’s cameo in Batman: The Brave and the Bold(2011)
In the episode “Scorn of the Sapphire,” Batman: The Brave and the Boldevokes the kitschy fun of Lynda Carter’s definitive take on Wonder Woman (see No. 2), even using her show’s theme song. When Wonder Woman gives the villainous Baroness an ultimatum — “As a woman, you should know that the path of violence is a barren one. Abandon your misguided ways — join the sisterhood of peace” — we hear the hero’s main drive. But what I love about this appearance is how reliant Steve Trevor is on Wonder Woman. How can that man even function without her? Apparently, he probably can’t.
5. Batman/Superman: Apocalypse (2010)
Since becoming a diehard Wonder Woman fan I’ve learned that the best adaptations of the character are found in DC’s animated films. Despite the title, the main draw of Batman/Superman: Apocalypse is watching the Amazon princess fighting side-by-side with my other favorite badass from DC Comics: Big Barda. The highlight is their fight against the Female Furies: a military group raised by Granny Goodness, previously trained by Big Barda, and loyal to Darkseid, the power-mad ruler of their planet. Even though she isn’t given much of an arc in the film, we are able to see her among her Amazon sisters and to see why she is undoubtedly the best fighter and tactician in the DC universe.
4. Justice League: The New Frontier (2008)
The New Frontierincludes one of my favorite Wonder Woman scenes ever: Set in 1954 Indochina, Wonder Woman liberates a group of imprisoned women and lets them kill the men who raped them and brutalized their town. In this adaptation, Wonder Woman is taller than Superman and she doesn’t back down to him. Plus, she’s voiced by Lucy Lawless, who many, including myself, longed to see play Wonder Woman.The New Frontier illustrates exactly why Wonder Woman is an amazing character by highlighting her feminism and strong moral center.
3. Wonder Woman (2009)
When George Perez, Greg Potter, and Len Wein revamped Wonder Woman in 1987, they made several instrumental changes that have come to define the character ever since. They were able to embody the spirit of Marston’s ideas while making her feel modern and more powerful. Gone is the World War II setting that previously defined Wonder Woman. She gains more powers from the gods, including the ability to fly, super speed, resistance to fire, and enhanced senses, for starters. The Amazons are updated to be the reincarnations of women killed throughout history because of the brutality of men.
This brisk, animated Wonder Woman film smartly uses the Perez reboot as its foundation. The film, which is co-written by comic writer Gail Simone, covers many definitive points of her story: We watch Steve Trevor crash-land on Themyscira; Princess Diana takes on the mantle of Wonder Woman after disguising herself in order to win a contest among her peers; she ventures into Man’s World, broadening her horizons and acting as a symbol of peace. It also uses one of her central villains from the comics, who embodies everything she is against: Ares, the god of war.
There’s a lot to love about the film. Watching Wonder Woman learn about the world outside of her home; her banter with Trevor; and seeing her come into her own are a few highlights. But it’s the beautifully depicted relationship with her mother, Queen Hippolyta, that keeps me coming back to the film. Hippolyta and Wonder Woman have a complicated, loving relationship that highlights the feminism inherent to the hero. Their dynamic is refreshing because it is still so rare to see a major hero’s origin story focus on their interactions with their mother … or really any woman beyond whoever is getting killed off to make them more angsty.
2. Wonder Woman (1975–1977)
For most people, Lynda Carter is the most recognizable image of Wonder Woman. As much as I love Carter’s performance, it says a lot about DC Comics’ faith in Wonder Woman that this adaptation is not only the most well-known, despite how the character has evolved since, but the last successful translation of her in live-action. That isn’t to say Carter’s Wonder Woman isn’t amazing, because she definitely is. The show is wonderfully kitschy, heartfelt, and leans into the character’s origins. It also gives us a kind of hero we don’t see enough: the emotionally available type.
Carter predates Wonder Woman’s more expansive power set and, arguably, the character’s best stories. Yet there is a reason she remains the definitive version of Wonder Woman. She evokes the very ideals Marston set out to support when he created the character, and marked a feminist awakening for many, becoming a symbol for the feminist movement. But it’s not just politics that make this take great. It’s a truly fun, enchanting, weird show to watch. Carter’s Wonder Woman embodies every reason why audiences love the character: grace, compassion, with just the right amount of badassery.
1. Justice League (2001–2004) and Justice League Unlimited(2004–2006)
While I love Lynda Carter’s take on Wonder Woman, when I want to see consistently great stories about the character outside of the comics, I turn to the animated series Justice League, and its related counterpart that expands the cast, Justice League: Unlimited. The series streamlines her origin by making one important shift: It’s usually Steve Trevor’s crash landing that thrusts her into the world beyond Themyscira. Here, shechooses to take on the mantle of Wonder Woman, going against her mother’s wishes and traveling to Man’s World to help when a hero like her is needed most.
This highlights what makes Wonder Woman so different from her peers: It isn’t justice that primarily guides her, but a sense of empathy. In the series, we watch her deal with her identity as an Amazon, while her relationships with her mother and the rest of the Justice League evolve in fascinating ways — particularly her somewhat-romance with Batman (which Batman v Superman seems to be referencing in recent trailers).
Yes, we get to see her kick a lot of ass, deflect bullets, and use the lasso of truth inventively. But what makes this Wonder Woman a great hero is her kindness and intelligence. If Gal Gadot’s take on the character focuses on those traits instead of only playing up her role as a warrior, we will witness not only an adaptation that does Wonder Woman justice, but also a weirder, more dynamic superhero than film has had in a while.
