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Daredevil

baileym43

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late to the party doing some catch up drinking.
ok . . . i finished season 1 a few weeks ago and i feel kinda the same as @"Gaith".  i mean, it's a fun show and refreshing for the Marvel live-action 'verse.  but it still doesn't hold a candle to Banshee.  i have several complaints . . maybe complaint is to strong because i still enjoyed watching the show start to finish and look forward to more.  but here we go...
1) not nearly enough joints being broken.  these are BAD GUYS DD is fighting.  he's looking to clean up his streets and he's going to face and torso punch everyone down.  if you get in a fight with a roomfull of dudes and you're looking to win, you break as many elbows as you can to start with then go for knees next.  not punch them in the face hoping you knock them out eventually.  plus a criminal with a limp or a weak grip on a gun is not an effective criminal anymore.
2) i know this is a tv show without near the budget of a big box office popcorn bowl, but there are a lot of cool and subtle ways to highlight DD's powers.  i had to remind myself he's got powers a number of times.  now we can't get the "world on fire" every episode and that would lose it's appeal quickly, but a small audio queue of what he's hearing would be nice.  lets not forget his sense of smell, which got zero mention (that i remember).  gun oil i guess is usually the only ever used.  but he could be sniffing the air a lot more.  he mentioned he can feel slight variations in air pressure which helps him identify room position, but he can feel heat too.  let's get some predator vision flashed in a few times.  that last episode of him tracking KP's truck was probably the best highlight of his powers.
3) only a small nitpick, but Charlie Cox needs to study more blind people and their mannerisms.  this one only sticks out for me because my wife has a sister who is blind from birth.  (but Matt lost his sight later on, blah blah, yeah i know.  i'm just giving my experience.)
4) KP's backstory of the abused kid.  eff, which chapter of the big book of chiches was this written from?  i don't really feel the abused kid would grow up to be a brilliant and ruthless crime boss.  especially when that abuse stopped after he killed his father.  here's a better story: his family was just poor, but doing their best every day.  but every day the neighborhood or dad's boss or life just shit on them.  eventually to get by little Fisk has to get a job, and this made his school suffer and his life got shit on even more.  so he found a way out by joining a local crime family and working his way up the ranks (did they not bother watching Goodfellas...  ignore the child abuse in that).  but i get it, the abused kid angle is easier for the idiot masses to follow.
5) like @"Gaith" mentioned too . . . the vague writing and story telling.  the business is suffering, Fisk needs to get his business together, i've got big plans for the city, the business is growing out of control, we gotta expose Fisk.  this show has a whole lot of dialog without saying anything.  we all assume the business they're in, drug trafficking and selling, human trafficking, protection, whatever else gangster movies has taught us to expect from inner cities.  but we see none of it and we don't even really hear about any of it.  some white power packets in the factory and a single shipping crate of girls.  but they have enough time to drag out trust and vigilante issues saying the same thing over and over and over.  we get to see more actual crime on Law & Order and they manage to also fit in a court case (well, they used too.)
ok, i'm done.  i'll say again, i still enjoy the show.  sometimes it just feels like more of the same hollywood telling how stupid we are.
 

mnkykungfu

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Gaith said:
So, I found the first season... kinda meh, actually. This is a show that pretty much demands to be set in the Seventies, and the vague references to Hell's Kitchen (or Manhattan in general? They're used pretty much interchangeably) being wrecked due to the Battle of New York don't make up for that fact.

Also problematic was Fisk. He kept saying he had a beautiful vision for the city, but what was that, exactly? Merely brand-new condos for rich outsiders? Would a neighborhood kid really want that? And he clearly wasn't actually interested in getting rid of the local drug trade, despite his public vows to the contrary. He was bad because he was bad and he was bad; which I don't find to be much to chew on.

Yes, there were some moments of real poignancy, and adult fears and concerns, much more so than other MCU properties to date, and yes, there were some good fights, but the final Fisk/Murdoch showdown in a random alley was some pretty weak sauce, as was the absence of f-bombs amidst on-screen gore and carnage. And the show falls into one of my pet peeves, wherein the main characters seem to have no life whatsoever outside the plot. Okay, Karen is new to town. But do Matt and Foggy have no other friends who call them up, or drop by, or ask them to hang?

I guess it's a good thing the Punisher's coming to town, because I'm afraid I don't yet see a very interesting future for this lot on their own. And as for street-level vigilantism, I frankly liked the first season of Arrow much more.

Season one: C+

Wow, that seems incredibly harsh.  While it may not have been flawless, I'm hard-pressed to think of many shows that accomplished what they were trying to be in a better way.  Which shows meet your standard for an A?
 
theslime said:
I like the show more than you did, [MENTION=6357]Gaith[/MENTION], but those are all valid concerns (also: pretty much the only time I've ever agreed with you, I think!), and I think it's harsh to use the dislike button to a well-reasoned post like this.

I don't think it's controversial to argue that not articulating ANY of Fisk's dreams for the city beyond the platitudes of "a better future" etc. was a cop-out, not to mention that we got a lot of insufferable dialogue about "MY CITY!" because no one went into specifics about anything. (Seriously, who talks like that?) That said, my main concern about Fisk was actually slightly different: I didn't buy his popularity after his press conference appearance AT ALL, considering he's obviously, even through the TV screens, a deeply disturbed, hulking bundle of repressed anger. That may work keeping Russian gangsters in check, but getting public approval for vague ideas? I don't buy it. Apart from that, I think D'Onofrio's performance was great, and I bought everything about his personality, just not his popularity, and the painting/wall pattern part was genius.

Also, Karen and Foggy (and Matt) had great chemistry together, and I would gladly watch a comedy procedural, Ally McBeal-style, with those two and Matt. I was surprised that some of my fave moments were so simple and often even really funny. I also bought Ben's paternal relationship with Karen. Vondie Curtis-Hall can sell anything. I even
shed a tear when he died.

Will definitely tune in next season.

TheSlime, I bet now that Trump is in office, you have a new perspective on public figures getting support for vague plans.  And probably a new perspective on angry old men being able to rally the people and rise to positions of power.

Season 2 was a mixed bag to me.  I thought the Punisher arc worked pretty damn well, the Elektra arc less so.  I've always felt the hordes of mystical ninjas in Manhattan idea was too difficult to buy into, and I wish they wouldn't have adapted Miller's work so literally.  The costumes for everyone too looked too cheesy in Season 2.

Season 3 however, totally turned it around!  A phenomenal season that got back to basics and is right up there with Season 1.  I do feel it's wide open to continue and didn't have as neat of a finale as Jessica Jones did, but it was still a great ending to the series.  I'd hold this show up there as a whole with any other show.
 

Gaith

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mnkykungfu said:
Wow, that seems incredibly harsh.  While it may not have been flawless, I'm hard-pressed to think of many shows that accomplished what they were trying to be in a better way.  Which shows meet your standard for an A?

A C+ grade isn't incredibly harsh; it means slightly above average, and I grade shows based on whether they achieve their own goals, so comparing them other series is tricky. That said, again, I think Arrow's first two seasons did a far better job of telling a grounded and gritty urban vigilante story that slowly became more outlandish. As for a crime opera story, Narcos blows Daredevil out of the water. (Of course, it helps that they tell mostly true stories.)
 
 
mnkykungfu said:
TheSlime, I bet now that Trump is in office, you have a new perspective on public figures getting support for vague plans.  And probably a new perspective on angry old men being able to rally the people and rise to positions of power.

I'm not TheSlime, of course, but no, the past few years haven't changed my perspective on Daredevil. In art as in life, context is (almost) everything. Could a Fisk-like figure win major public office in lots of... not-so-cosmopolitan states today? Perhaps. In Manhattan, though? No way. :p
 

mnkykungfu

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Gaith said:
mnkykungfu said:
Wow, that seems incredibly harsh.  While it may not have been flawless, I'm hard-pressed to think of many shows that accomplished what they were trying to be in a better way.  Which shows meet your standard for an A?

A C+ grade isn't incredibly harsh; it means slightly above average, and I grade shows based on whether they achieve their own goals, so comparing them other series is tricky. That said, again, I think Arrow's first two seasons did a far better job of telling a grounded and gritty urban vigilante story that slowly became more outlandish. As for a crime opera story, Narcos blows Daredevil out of the water. (Of course, it helps that they tell mostly true stories.)
 
 
mnkykungfu said:

I'm not TheSlime, of course, but no, the past few years haven't changed my perspective on Daredevil. In art as in life, context is (almost) everything. Could a Fisk-like figure win major public office in lots of... not-so-cosmopolitan states today? Perhaps. In Manhattan, though? No way. :p

<ahem> Rudy Giuliani <ahem>

But anyway, I'm not here to talk politics.  I think Fisk is a very believable demagogue, I'll leave it at that.

As far as "incredibly harsh", I can rephrase that as "a strict set of criteria".  By your comparisons to Arrow though, I'll just have to agree to disagree.  I've tried to watch several different episodes of several seasons of that show, and I couldn't make it more than 10 minutes through a single one.  It's so...incredibly...cheesy.  

All the DC shows are pretty B-rate.  So many bad actors, so many horrible looking cheesy costumes, so many ridiculous lines of dialogue, so many unbelievable plot lines.  I mean, if somebody tells me they watch them as a guilty pleasure?  Fine.  Hey, I watched a few seasons of Smallville back in the day.  I get it.

But comparing those shows to Daredevil?  Oh my lord.  To me, that's like saying ...Cardi B... is a better songwriter than ...I dunno, Led Zeppelin.  There's just no accounting for somebody's individual taste, I guess.
 
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