Tag Archives: birds of prey

Every DCEU Movie, Ranked

Jesse is a cofounder of SportsAlcohol.com even though he doesn't care for sports or alcohol. His favorite movie is Ron Howard's The Paper. I think. This is what happens when you don't write your own bio. I know for sure likes pie.
Jesse

Sure, there are twentysomething Marvel movies that we could sort and rank and argue over. In fact, the good people SportsAlochol once tried this as a group, and we may circle back to the project one day. But you know what’s a lot easier? Ranking the extended-universe movies from DC Comics, which kicked off in 2013 with the Superman reboot Man of Steel, and now, the better part of a decade later, continue to wonder around, stumbling across various megahits, disappointments, and flops, sometimes, somehow, in the same film. In celebration of the DCEU’s first actual sequel, the brand-new Wonder Woman 1984 hitting theaters and HBO Max in the U.S. on December 25th, here’s one man’s rundown of the whole DC shebang, before The Batman comes out in 2022 and makes it all even more confusing. All your favorites are here: Wonder Woman! And others! Like Enchantress! Now please let this all last long enough for them to make a Starfire movie!
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BIRDS OF PREY and the DC Movie Visual Aesthetic

Jesse is a cofounder of SportsAlcohol.com even though he doesn't care for sports or alcohol. His favorite movie is Ron Howard's The Paper. I think. This is what happens when you don't write your own bio. I know for sure likes pie.
Jesse

There is a scene around halfway through Birds of Prey (And the Fantabulous Emancipation of One Harley Quinn) where One Harley Quinn (Margot Robbie), bon vivant, high-spirited thief, and ex-girlfriend of the Joker, enters a police station and fights her way through multiple officers, on her way to abduct a young pickpocket. Rather than leaving all-out carnage in her wake, Harley employs a serious of non-lethal methods: a beanbag gun, confetti bombs, and brightly colored smoke. (She also beats the shit out of a few of them, but no one appears to die.)

Normally, this would seem like another superhero movie hedging its bets, indulging violence while avoiding any real consequences—and to some degree, it probably is that. But Birds of Prey has an emphatic R rating (albeit seemingly more for the convenience of saying “fuck” as often as it wants than for its occasional gore), so these nontraditional weapons serve a purpose beyond appeasing the MPAA. The color-coordinated smokebombs and glitter explosions aren’t calling cards Harley Quinn leaves behind so much as the character art-directing her own music video as she goes along.
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