Black Panther: Wakanda Forever - Marvel Misses Again

****THIS IS A SPOILER FREE REVIEW!! THIS REVIEW CONTAINS ZERO SPOILERS!!****

My Rating: 1.5 out of 5 stars

My Recommendation: SKIP IT. A bloated and bland mess of a movie that is firmly in the bottom tier of the Marvel Cinematic Universe.

Black Panther: Wakanda Forever, the sequel to the billion-dollar blockbuster Marvel movie Black Panther (2018), premiered in theatres back on November 11th, and is now available on Disney Plus, and I just watched it and have some thoughts.

The Marvel Cinematic Universe has been in steep decline since the glory days of late last decade when Infinity War (2018) and Endgame (2019) both made over two billion dollars in back-to-back years.

Since that creative and financial high point Marvel has stumbled and bumbled by churning out a plethora of abysmal movies, like Black Widow, Eternals and Shang-Chi, that featured second and third-rate characters, all of which underperformed at the box office.

Even the most financially successful movie of this era (I’m not counting the Spider-Man movies which are Sony/Marvel movies and not Disney/Marvel movies), Dr. Strange in the Multiverse of Madness, which made over $900 million at the box office, was a pretty awful affair.

In reading the tea leaves it seemed to me that the key film in judging the overall creative and financial health of the MCU going forward would be Taika Waititi’s Thor: Love and Thunder which hit theatres this past Summer. Thor: Love and Thunder was the sequel to Waititi’s glorious Thor: Ragnarok, one of the very best Marvel movies ever made. If any movie was going to stop the bleeding at Marvel it would be Love and Thunder. And then I saw Love and Thunder.

Love and Thunder did not stop the bleeding. It was just as awful as the rest of the post-Endgame Disney/Marvel movies, and it massively underperformed at the box office, bringing in just $761 million on a bloated $250 million budget. Not good.

After Love and Thunder failed, the next big Marvel bellwether, if not its backstop, was the highly anticipated Black Panther: Wakanda Forever. Unfortunately for Marvel, I can report that Wakanda Forever didn’t stop the bleeding either.

Wakanda Forever, directed and co-written by the same man who made the original, Ryan Coogler, did do better than Love and Thunder, but it didn’t do much better as it made $842 million on a $250 million budget. Compared to the original Black Panther, which made $1.38 billion and garnered an Oscar nomination for Best Picture, Wakanda Forever massively under-performed financially, to the tune of nearly half a billion less than the original.

An easy explanation for that precipitous box office drop-off is that Black Panther starred Chadwick Boseman – who tragically died of cancer in 2020. The great hurdle for Wakanda Forever to overcome was the loss of Boseman who was slated to star in the film. After his death Ryan Coogler and Disney shifted gears and, instead of recasting another actor as Black Panther, came up with a story not just in Boseman’s absence but which is centered around his absence.

Chadwick Boseman certainly seemed like a very nice guy but I never found him to be very charismatic or compelling on-screen, even in the original Black Panther, my review of which I think stands up quite well five years later. While Black Panther with Boseman felt charisma-challenged to me, Wakanda Forever without Boseman is like a black hole of anti-charisma that sucks all light and life into its darkness leaving behind a dull, dismal and distinctly lifeless-void.

The convoluted plot of Wakanda Forever revolves around the death of King T’Challa (Boseman) and how it effects his sister Shuri (Letitia Wright), his mother Ramonda (Angela Bassett), and the people of Wakanda.

On top of King T’Challa’s death, Wakanda and its royal family are confronted by the superhero/supervillain Namor, a flying Aquaman type guy who is king of the Talokan people, who live deep in the sea as a result of European colonialism in Latin America. Sigh.

Through an incoherent course of events Namor looks to ally with Wakanda to create an alliance of anti-oppressors, but in turn he demands that a brilliant, young, African-American girl from Chicago who is studying at MIT, Riri Williams, be killed first because she developed a special machine, the only one of its kind, that can detect vibranium – the stuff that makes Wakanda superior and which was just discovered deep in the ocean near Talokan. Shuri and Queen Ramonda balk at Namor’s Riri killing proposal and try to protect her, which puts Wakanda at war with Talokan.

The result of all of this is foolishness is that Wakanda Forever is a bloated, bland and boring two-hours and forty minutes long. It’s action and fight sequences are uncomfortably amateurish. It’s CGI is second, if not third-rate. Its cinematography is stilted and flat. And its script and narrative are embarrassing and incorrigibly trite. Besides that, how was the play Mrs. Lincoln?

In keeping with the tedious and relentless Disney/Marvel agenda, race and gender swapping is rampant in Wakanda Forever. Namor in the Marvel comics is a white/Atlantean/Asian guy, but in the movie, he has been remade – or race-swapped, into an indigenous Central American god who loathes the European colonizers who killed his culture and family. Yawn.

Then there’s Riri Williams, who is basically a black girl Iron Man with her own Iron Man suit to boot. And to no one’s surprise, the new Black Panther is a black woman too, as Shuri dons the new Black Panther outfit. You go girls!!

The recent spate of Marvel films and tv shows have all centered women and women of color, and all the white male characters have been replaced with either women, minorities or women minorities…and frankly, they have all suffered for it.

Thankfully there is a white guy in Wakanda Forever, he’s the flaccid, cuckold CIA agent (Martin Freeman) who gets duped by his much smarter and more powerful ex-wife (Julia Louis-Dreyfuss). Down with the patriarchy!!

All of this agenda driven nonsense wouldn’t concern me in the least, it really wouldn’t, if the movie was at least well-made and/or mildly entertaining. It is neither. It is, at best, a middling, lower-level Marvel movie. It’s better than Eternals, but that’s not exactly a high bar.

As for the performances, they are for the most part underwhelming.

Angela Bassett has been nominated for a Best Supporting Actress Academy Award for her work as grief-stricken mother Queen Ramonda. Bassett is…fine. She’s always a very compelling screen presence and I’m sure she’ll win the Oscar and I’ll be happy for her because she seems like a good person, but I’m not so sure she deserves it for this role.

Letitia Wright as Shuri on the other hand is an absolute mystery to me. I thought she was terrible in Black Panther and I find her equally terrible in this. First off, she’s playing a teenager/young woman and yet she looks like she’s in her mid-fifties. Secondly, she is so devoid of magnetism she might as well be invisible.

Dominique Thorne is another mystery. Her work as Riri Williams is so shallow and predictable as to be caricature. Her acting is of the tired style that has become so common nowadays – where preening and posing passes for artistry. Hopefully Thorne will grow out of pretending and mugging for the camera and actually start acting.

Tenoch Huerta Mejia plays Namor and is completely lifeless. For a guy fueled by revenge he’s got nothing going on behind his eyes. It would also be a good idea if you’re going to play a superhero/villain to maybe hit the gym for a bit, especially if you’re going to be shirtless for the entirety of the movie. Tough to suspend disbelief when some doughy son of a bitch is trying to pass himself off as some super strong being. Hell, if doughy dudes could be superheroes…I’d be the fucking Hulk, Wolverine and Thor combined. Meija is so doughy they would’ve been better off casting the Stay-Puff Marshmallow Man in the role of Namor, but that would never have been allowed because that fat sack of shit is too white.

On the bright side in regards to Wakanda Forever, I thought showing only Chadwick Boseman as Black Panther in the Marvel Title Sequence – which usually features all the superheroes, was a classy tribute. On the other hand, the film’s use of Boseman’s death to promote itself and generate ticket sales feels exploitative to me. I understand that it’s a tough tightrope to walk…I’m just uncomfortable with that type of thing.  

Another issue that Wakanda Forever brings up for me is in regards to writer/director Ryan Coogler. It seems pretty obvious at this point that Coogler, despite his promising start with Fruitvale Station, is simply not a good filmmaker. I’ll be interested to see what he does now and if he moves away from these franchise films – something he’d be wise to do. But I wonder if the protective bubble of franchise films is protecting him and deflecting criticism of his ability. Regardless, he’s not done anything good since Fruitvale Station.

The bottom line regarding Black Panther: Wakanda Forever is that it is just another in the long line of recent Marvel movies to be utterly and entirely forgettable. There really is no need whatsoever for you waste your time and see this movie, even for “free” on Disney Plus.

At this point, after the failures of Love and Thunder and Wakanda Forever, the Marvel Cinematic Universe feels mortally wounded and I’m having a difficult time imaging a scenario where it rebounds from the dual plagues of audience Marvel fatigue and Disney/Marvel’s creative bankruptcy.

In terms of the future, Marvel seems to be going all in on the woke agenda stuff, which, love it or loathe it, has proven over and over again to be toxic to large swaths of the viewing public, most notably the most rabid and die-hard of Marvel fans.

The biggest problem though is that regardless of any political and cultural messages ingrained into Marvel movies, if the movies themselves and the characters they feature are not high quality and compelling, then they will quickly become entirely irrelevant in the blink of an eye. Black Panther: Wakanda Forever is stark proof of that.

 Follow me on Twitter @MPMActingCo

©2023

Sr. : A Documentary Review - Robert Downey Jr. on Robert Downey Sr.

My Rating: 3.75 out of 5 stars

My Recommendation: SEE IT. A charming and surprisingly poignant documentary about a famous son examining the life of his enigmatic father.

Sr. is the new Netflix documentary that explores the complex relationship between mega movie-star Robert Downey Jr. and his film maker father Robert Downey Sr.

The film, directed by documentarian Chris Smith, who has made such notable docs as American Movie, Tiger King and 100 Foot Wave, premiered on Netflix December 2nd.

As everyone knows, Robert Downey Jr. is one of the most successful and wealthiest movie stars of the current age. His work as Iron Man was the lynchpin for the Marvel Cinematic Universe’s astonishingly successful run from 2008 to 2019.

Jr.’s father, Robert Downey Sr., is less well-known outside of Hollywood than his famous progeny, but is a legend in his own right among those in the know in the movie business.

Downey Sr. was an independent, unorthodox, somewhat avant-garde filmmaker in the 1960’s, 70’s and 80’s. Sr.’s films never found any mainstream success but did develop a cult following, which included such notable directors as Paul Thomas Anderson.

I readily admit that Sr.’s films never held the least bit of appeal for me. In fact, I find Robert Downey Sr.’s movies to be…well…mostly trash, and I’ve never understood their low rent appeal. But to each his own. That said, Sr. may not have been a gifted movie maker but he was, as evidenced by the closer examination of him by this documentary, unquestionably an artist at heart…maybe not a particularly skilled artist, but an artist nonetheless. This is evident in how he sees the world through an artist’s eyes and finds brilliance and meaning in the mundane…like when he marvels over ducks in a small city pond or is thrilled when a skateboarder nearly runs him over.

Downey Sr. was a paragon of the 1960’s, so much so that he became a victim of his own appetites. In the 1970’s, Sr. became addicted to cocaine and he passed on that unfortunate trait to his son, Robert Downey Jr., whom he introduced to pot at a very young age.

Thankfully, Downey Sr. got sober in the 1980’s, but this was right when Downey Jr.’s addiction was going meteoric. Downey Jr.’s substance abuse issues raged for years and nearly killed both his career and his self. This tension over Downey Jr.’s troubled past and Downey Sr.’s complicity in instigating it, is the subtle, unspoken center of Sr. as Robert Downey Jr. gently searches for answers while his father’s health deteriorates.  

Robert Downey Jr. grew up on camera, getting his first gig working in his father’s film when he was fresh out of diapers, and his default position is one of performance, and so it is in Sr. But Downey Jr.’s performative instinct is so second nature that it actually feels quite genuine when captured in the documentary, and comes across as both endearing and vulnerable.

A movie star making a documentary about his father could have been nothing but a narcissistic, maudlin venture, and while there is certainly something somewhat narcissistic about the festivities in Sr., the film is so laced with a tender and yearning humanity that it becomes engaging, captivating and ultimately deeply moving despite its famous subjects.

Robert Downey Jr. is revealed in Sr. to be a kind-hearted, fragile kid grown up who tenderly loves his dad and wants to find both satisfactory answers for the demons from his past but also peace and acceptance from his dying father.

Downey Sr., to his credit, accepts responsibility for his poor parenting choices and the burden he placed upon his son, and he doesn’t so much avoid answering tough questions as he simply runs out of adequate things to say and the energy to say them.

Downey Jr. doesn’t get the answers he yearns for in Sr., and neither do viewers, but there is a poignancy in his gentle search and in his father’s good-nature that is profound.

Both Robert Downey Jr. and Robert Downey Sr. are preternaturally charming and relentlessly likeable men, and their charm and charisma transform Sr. from a run-of-the-mill movie star tribute to their dad into an entertaining, and remarkably moving chronicle of a son’s bearing witness to the end of his enigmatic father’s life.

If you’re not a fan of Robert Downey Sr.’s movies, or even of Robert Downey Jr’s movies, there is still a lot to appreciate and to relate to in this poignant documentary, especially if you’re a son who has lost a father and been left with more questions than answers.

©2022

She-Hulk: Attorney at Law - Episode One: Review

She-Hulk: Attorney at Law is the new Marvel series that premiered on Disney + on Thursday, August 18th. The comedy series, which will drop a new episode every Thursday for the next 8 weeks (9 episodes in total) until its finale on October 13th, follows the trials and tribulations of Jennifer Walters, a not-so-mild mannered lawyer who becomes a hulk just like her cousin Bruce Banner.

The opening scene of She-Hulk: Attorney at Law basically tells you all you need to know about Marvel’s latest series.

In that scene, Jennifer (Tatiana Maslany) is in her law office and a Ruth Bader Ginsburg bobblehead that says, “I’m not arguing, I’m explaining why I’m right” is prominently displayed next to her. So apparently just like her hero RBG, Jen/She-Hulk is going to be an attention-seeking, self-aggrandizing feminist lawyer who’s unfettered narcissism assists in aborting Roe v Wade! Just kidding.

What I meant to say was…Yay! Marvel is still committing mass entertainment malpractice with its relentlessly trite woke posing and pandering!

In case the RBG bobblehead was too subtle for the Neanderthals out there, the first episode also gives viewers one of the most ham-handed, gag-inducing, girl power garbage monologues in MCU history. In the rant Jen/She-Hulk womansplains to Bruce Banner/Hulk,

"Well, here's the thing, Bruce, I'm great at controlling my anger, I do it all the time. When I'm catcalled in the street, when incompetent men explain my own area of expertise to me. I do it pretty much every day, because if I don't, I'll get called 'emotional' or 'difficult', or might just literally get murdered. So I'm an expert at controlling my anger because I do it infinitely more than you!"

Hysterical. “Literally”. As in Jennifer Walters/She-Hulk, like so many privileged women today, is suffering from hysteria, a mental illness causing ungovernable emotional excess, in this case mixed with self-serving, decadent delusions of grandeur and persecution.

While I find this shameless brand of vapid virtue signaling in a series or film to be at its very best tedious (regardless of whether it’s from the left with its wokeness or the right with its vacuous flag waving and militarism), the reality is that in this day and age one must simply accept insipid cultural politics as part of art and entertainment and try to ignore it as best you can and judge the work on its other potential merits.

In other words, the question becomes, if you put aside the obvious malevolent misandry, neo-feminist foolishness and girl power garbage, is She-Hulk: Attorney at Law any good?

It’s difficult to decisively declare after watching just one episode, but I will say this…it doesn’t look promising…at all.

The first episode of She-Hulk: Attorney at Law is guilty of being a truly terrible bit of television and portends yet another miserable Marvel monstrosity in a string of miserable Marvel monstrosities.

Since Avengers: Endgame Marvel has churned out one piece of detritus after another. Just this year alone the Marvel machine has shat out the muddled mess of Dr. Strange in the Multiverse of Madness and the insidiously silly Thor: Love and Thunder. On the tv side, Marvel has cranked the crap up to eleven with an array of fecal matter in the form of Moon Knight and Ms. Marvel, whose pungent stench is spectacularly repellent.

To be fair to the geniuses over at Marvel, I didn’t think they could do any worse than the recent Ms. Marvel series, but to their credit they really pushed themselves and it sure as hell seems that She-Hulk is even worse than that moronic shit show.

A huge issue with She-Hulk is that it’s supposed to be a comedy and yet seems deathly allergic to being funny. The show certainly loves itself and thinks it’s hilarious as it’s chock full of lame Marvel inside jokes (how clever!) and breaking of the fourth wall (how original and clever!) and a bevy of nonsense that is altogether too cute and faux clever for its own good. Never mind laugh, I didn’t even crack a scintilla of smile for the entire episode.

She-Hulk bills itself as a legal-comedy in the mold of Ally McBeal with a strong female superhero in the lead, an idea that would’ve made me throw up in my mouth at the pitch meeting…reason #2,467,942 why I’m not working as a suit at Disney.

Whatever creative genius thought, “hmmm…you know that Marvel needs to do? They need to make a…(checks notes)…legal comedy with a third-rate Marvel character and load it with divisive cultural politics!” should be found guilty of egregious bad taste, disbarred and ejected from the Writer’s Guild, the Producer’s Guild and all of Hollywood.

Of course, the oblivious Marvel marketing machine was in full swing leading up to the premiere with countless commissioned articles declaring She-Hulk to be the “best Marvel show!”

The other narrative around She-Hulk is that it’s vitally important for studios to support female-led superhero projects, especially in the wake of the Batgirl movie being thrown in the dumpster by Warner Brothers…or at least that’s what an absurd article at Yahoo news told me. Sigh.

How about we just support good shows and movies and abort this addiction to diversity, equity, inclusion horseshit now before it destroys cinema and television completely? And yes, I know I’m pissing in the wind with that exhortation but good lord Marvel is quickly circling down the drain and can’t seem to get out of their own way when it comes to this stuff.

Speaking of which, given that the politically correct cultural politics of the show make it nearly impossible for critics to give it the savaging it so rightly deserves, it’s still astonishing that it’s only getting very mild praise from a cornucopia of critics, many of whom delicately say it’s “good” but “could’ve been better”. In our current cultural climate of critical cowardice, that benign critique registers as a scathing review.

One of the biggest problems with She-Hulk, besides the fact that the character is a joke of a superhero that no one gives a rat’s ass about, is that the CGI in the first episode is God-awful to the point of being embarrassing.

There has been a lot of press about how over-worked and mistreated CGI artists are right now, so the show’s piss poor CGI is understandable in a certain respect, but it’s so egregious as to be unprofessional, and that’s a major problem.

I remember when I went to see Batman v Superman and Superman’s face looked really bizarre in a bunch of scenes…just grotesque, and then I read later that actor Henry Cavill had grown a mustache for another movie (a Mission Impossible movie if I recall correctly) and couldn’t shave it so when they did re-shoots for BvS they had to CGI out his mustache. That terrible BvS mustache removing CGI is a million times better than the junk in She-Hulk.

Speaking of technical misfires, the action sequences in She-Hulk, of which there are a scant few in the opening episode, are uncomfortably amateurish too, and feel like they were choregraphed and shot by a toddler.

Also abysmally atrocious is the editing and the overall cinematography. The first episode is poorly shot and the editing seems chopped together by a band of blind monkeys let loose in an editing room.

The biggest problem though is that the script…my God the script. The remarkable thing about the She-Hulk script is that it’s both too slow and too fast at the same time. The first episode, which runs forty minutes or so, feels like it takes 3 hours to watch. In that forty-minutes the story is completely rushed as there is no character development, no relationships fleshed out and no worthy story arc introduced.

For example, Jennifer Walters becomes a She-Hulk because she gets some of Bruce Banner/Hulk’s blood in her system. This sequence is so bland, forgettable and throwaway as to be astonishing. A kid playing with action figures would’ve given it more gravitas knowing that it’s the cornerstone of the entire series. In the show the event happens and is never commented on again…it’s just something that happened and is forgotten.  

As for the cast…well…they don’t fare well at all but you can’t blame them as the dialogue they have to regurgitate is asinine.

Tatiana Maslany was great in Orphan Black but here she seems…off. Maslany is forced, unfunny and aggressively anti-charismatic. Maslany’s inelegant recitation of the odious dialogue is wooden and lifeless.

Speaking of wooden and lifeless, Mark Ruffalo utters every line of dialogue like he’s locked in a coffin suffocating on his own farts.

She-Hulk has eight more episodes to go and things could improve over those episodes, but considering the startlingly low quality of episode one, and of Marvel’s recent cinematic and tv output, I’m extremely doubtful.

The bottom line is that She-Hulk episode one is bad, but I’ll check back in midway through the series and again at the end of the series to let you dear readers know my ultimate ruling and whether She-Hulk: Attorney at Law is guilty of egregious storytelling malpractice in the first degree and deserving of the death penalty.

©2022

Ms. Marvel (Disney +): TV Review

MS. MARVEL

Season One - 6 Episodes - Disney +

My Rating: 1 out of 5 stars

My Recommendation: SKIP IT. This series is embarrassingly bad and embodies everything that is wrong with the current Marvel machine. Under no circumstances should you watch it.

I just finished watching the season finale of Ms. Marvel, the latest Marvel superhero series on Disney +, and my question is this…what in the hell are we doing? Seriously, like, what the fuck are we doing as a country, as a culture, as a species?

The six-episode series, which tells the origin story of Kamala Khan aka Ms. Marvel – a superhero obsessed teenage Pakistani-American girl living in Jersey City who discovers she has super powers, is the most embarrassing, most egregious and most-cringe-worthy piece of garbage Marvel has released on the small screen, which considering it came out right after the steaming pile of feces that was Moon Knight, is quite an achievement.

A brief rundown of the plot is that Kamala loves Marvel superheroes (Captain Marvel most of all) and wants to be one. Then through some family history and Pakistani lore, she ends up discovering she has powers but has to hide them from her loving but conservative immigrant parents and her friends. A journey from Jersey City to Karachi and back again ensues and there are some poorly written and poorly delivered expositional monologues and some hysterically bad action sequences and then it comes to the most-inane anti-climax imaginable.  

Ms. Marvel sucks…it really, truly does suck, the reason for that is because Ms. Marvel as a character is extraordinarily dull, her origin story (at least the one presented in this series) is even duller and her superpowers are absurdly bland. The series itself looks unconscionably cheap, most notably its laughably amateurish special effects, not to mention the inept acting, insipid writing, incompetent directing and its mind-numbingly pedestrian action sequences.

The reality is that Ms. Marvel is, at best, a third-rate show for kids…and by ‘kids’ I mean really, really stupid, little kids. It’s like a superhero version of Hannah Montana or Lizzie McGuire or That’s So Raven, because it doesn’t show what life is really like for teenagers, but what adults think little kids think life is like for teenagers. The series would be better suited for Disney Kids or Disney Junior or whatever the fuck the money-hungry monsters at Mickey Mouse now call their mind-destroying, child indoctrinating channel.

Speaking of which, the star of Ms. Marvel, Iman Vellani, is, to her credit, a somewhat appealing presence – sort of like Hillary Duff as Lizzie McGuire or something like that, but she is also…just like Hillary Duff, a truly atrocious actress, and watching her try to vacuously mug, pose and preen her way through scenes is like watching a toddler repeatedly soil their Underoos.

To be clear though, Ms. Marvel’s awfulness is not Iman Vellani’s fault by any stretch, hell, you could cast Meryl Streep in this thing and still want to gouge your eyes out rather than keep watching it.

There has been a lot of hype around the series with critics fawning all over it, so much so that it is “officially the highest critically-rated Marvel series in history”, with a 98% critical score at review aggregator website Rotten Tomatoes.

Of course, this is just more proof of critic’s desperate virtue signaling and pandering than anything else. Critics are falling over themselves to adore Ms. Marvel simply because of the show’s ‘representation’ in the form of a South Asian centered storyline and diverse cast.

The critical praise of Ms. Marvel highlights the trouble with film/tv criticism in these hyper-politicized and polarized times. Namely, film/tv critics have placed representation, diversity and inclusion atop their hierarchy when evaluating a movie or show, with quality, creativity and artistry barely registering as something of value. These critics could never give an honest assessment of Ms. Marvel and excoriate it for its obvious failings because that would give comfort and aid to the bad people…or something like that. It would also open them up to attacks from the swarms of Savanarolas on Twitter who bring down the hammer on anyone who dare question the woke inquisition.

While Disney/Marvel may revel in the praise of the sycophantic simpletons who make up the Rotten Tomatoes roster of critics, they’re not faring nearly as well with audiences, as Ms. Marvel is officially the least watched of all the Marvel tv series.

Disney/Marvel and many intellectually impotent critics are blaming Ms. Marvel’s poor viewership numbers on…you guessed it, “racism!” This is par for the course and is standard operating procedure at the Disney distillery of dismal drama. The masterminds at the Mickey Mouse mansion make a shitty show or movie and then call people “racist” for pointing out how poorly conceived and executed the stupid, shitty show/movie really is. This happens all the time with the god-awful Star Wars shows and movies, and with the Marvel products as well.

Unlike most critics, but like most fans, I truly do not give a flying fuck about representation, diversity and inclusion, all I care about is quality, creativity and artistry…of which most of what Marvel and Disney vomit out onto the public nowadays, Ms. Marvel included, has none.

Am I supposed to pretend Ms. Marvel doesn’t suck just because the main character is a Pakistani-American and a Muslim? That seems absolutely absurd to me, and frankly, feels mightily paternalistic, condescending and cowardly.

The idea of a Muslim superhero is pretty intriguing, and if it that part of a character and story could be explored in a well-executed, serious and profound way, say, like the terrific Netflix series (which is now streaming on Disney +) Daredevil and how it used its main character’s Catholicism as a crucial part of his inner life and mythos, then I’d be all in. But the Muslim aspect of Ms. Marvel is the most offensively vapid and vacant bit of window dressing meant to do little more than check a box.

As for the claim that ‘racism’ is the motivating factor in audience’s dislike and distaste for Ms. Marvel, it is equally condescending and frankly, aggressively moronic.

It seems much more likely that audiences have stayed away from Ms. Marvel in droves because the character is a forgettable, fourth rate superhero that’s painfully new to the Marvel canon (she was created in 2014), so no one has ever even heard of her or cares about her.

Another factor is that Marvel fatigue post-Endgame is a real thing and is only growing stronger everyday as Marvel/Disney spew out one more piece of junk tv show or movie after another.

And on top of all that there are no “stars” in the show…I mean even the dreadful Moon Knight had Oscar Isaac in it.

Of course, if viewers did tune in to Ms. Marvel, they would’ve been met with such an incorrigibly incoherent story that they would’ve been wise to bail early…I wish I did. But lucky for you, dear reader, I watched this piece of shit so you don’t have to….and you really don’t have to.

The bottom line is that Ms. Marvel is just another buoy guiding Disney on their collision course with the deadly iceberg of wokeness, which worships representation, diversity and inclusion and ignores quality, creativity and artistry, a formula which will ultimately sink the previously-believed-to-be-unsinkable cash cow known as the good ship Marvel.

If you are one of the myopic mental defectives working at Marvel or Disney, grab a life-jacket and hop into a life-boat now, because by the looks of things your corporate caretaker is steaming full speed towards its own oblivion and is completely blind to its impending doom.

©2022

The Boys (Amazon) Season Three: TV Review

****THIS IS A SPOILER FREE REVIEW!! THIS REVIEW CONTAINS ZERO SPOILERS!!****

THE BOYS

SEASON FOUR - 8 EPISODES - AMAZON PRIME

My Rating: 4.5 stars

My Recommendation: SEE IT. A batshit and brilliant evisceration of the monolithic Marvel superhero myth and America’s corrupt culture and politics

When the alternative superhero series The Boys first premiered on Amazon Prime Video back in July of 2019, it was a sublime, and well-deserved, kick in the nuts to the mega-Marvel monolith that had grown to dominate American culture like no other corporate IP before it.

The Boys, which is based on a comic book series of the same name, tore back the curtain of the superhero craze and exposed these superbeings for what they really are…narcissistic, megalomaniacal monsters used by the ruling elite to propagandize the masses into mindlessly worshiping corporatism, militarism and fascism.

The series was jarring for its savage, realistic violence and for its daring, cutting-edge politics. For example, in season one it more than implied, but nearly shouted from the rooftops, that 9-11 really was an inside job. Pretty ballsy for a piece of pop entertainment streaming on Amazon.

Well, The Boys are now back with their third season (8 episodes), which premiered its first episode on June 3rd and its season finale on Friday July 8, and despite some minor flaws, it’s as gory, gloriously gonzo, batshit, brilliant and beautiful as ever.

I will avoid spoilers but will just say that on the menu this season is penis spelunking, a superhero orgy, octopus fucking and hospital bed handjobs and many other obscenities and absurdities, and all of which are manic, mad and magnificent.

The machinations of the plot for season three are somewhat complex but remarkably easy to follow. The Boys, which consist of Billy Butcher (Karl Urban), Hughie Campbell (Jack Quaid), M.M. (Laz Alonso), Frenchie (Tomer Capone) and Kimiko (Karen Fuluhara), are still on their seemingly Quixotic quest to destroy the “Supes” (superheroes) who have harmed them or their loved ones in one way or another.

Meanwhile, the Supes and their corporate overlords at Vought International are just as diabolical as ever and are intent on controlling the masses and expanding their power and profits by any means necessary. Sound frighteningly familiar? If you have half a brain in your head and eyes to see the world around you, it should.

Unlike the relentlessly politically-correct, anti-septic, cash-grab Marvel movies, The Boys boasts insightful and cutting social and political commentary that is more even-handed (maybe unintentionally so) in extending its middle-finger than it might appear on the surface. The series isn’t just some left-wing screed or right-wing rant as it eviscerates and devastates both sides of the universally vacuous and villainous corporatist, oligarchical, aristocratic, kleptocratc ruling party that currently enslaves America. The Boys is brilliant pop entertainment because it uses the cloak of a snarky superhero story to get out its not-so-secret, subversive sub-text about the vampiric power of American corptocracy, media mendacity and government duplicity, to a mainstream audience.

In addition to its penetrating and perceptive social and political commentary, it also features top-notch acting across the board.

Karl Urban is brutishly charismatic and charming as the foul-mouthed Butcher. Equally good is Jack Quaid as the doe-eyed Hughie, who is a complex character just beneath his goofy, scared-rabbit exterior.

Both Tomer Capone and Laz Alonso as Frenchie and M.M. respectively, have stand out seasons as their characters are given more depth and their backstories more fleshed out.

My favorite performance among ‘the boys’ is actually by the female, Karen Fukuhara as Kimiko. Kimiko is mute and Fukuhara fills her with such a visceral inner life and longing that she lights up the screen.

As for the Supes, there are a plethora of great performances to acknowledge there too.

Antony Starr’s Homelander – who is sort of a cross between Captain America and Superman, is one of the best/worst villains on television and boasts one of the most punchable faces imaginable. Starr’s performance is mesmerizing as Homelander barely conceals the hatred and insecurity boiling beneath his all-American surface.

Jessie T. Usher as the knock-off Flash, A-Train, is given more to do this season and certainly makes the most of it as the writers explore his race and his place in society.

Chace Crawford is spectacular as The Deep (basically a perverted Aquaman), and his storyline, which guts the self-help/celebrity industrial complex, is deliriously good.

Equally terrific is Jensen Ackles as Soldier Boy, a sort of Reagan-esque wet dream Captain America 1.0. Ackles gives complexity and depth to the character that in lesser hands would’ve been just an empty bad guy.

As for Nathan Mitchell who plays the masked Black Noir, his performance is difficult to judge, but the Black Noir storyline is spectacularly written and executed. I won’t give any of it away but that story brings an invigorating perspective shift and visual flair that I found greatly appealing, and ultimately extremely moving.

Other solid performances from the likes of Dominique McElligott as Queen Maeve, Erin Moriarty as Starlight, Claudia Doumit as Victoria Neuman, and most especially a brilliant Colby Minifie as whipping post, errand girl and babysitter for supes Ashley, fill out a superb cast that raises The Boys to sublime creative heights.

In a time of rampant government and corporate corruption, media mendacity and artistic/entertainment conformity, watching The Boys brash and brazen approach, which features supreme writing, acting and directing, along with its decidedly unorthodox, anti-establishment ideology, is like walking under a crisp, cool waterfall on a stifling Summer day.

If you aren’t faint of heart, don’t mind blood, guts and bizarre superhero sexual situations, and like your superhero stories with an edge, then The Boys may very well be for you. It certainly is for me, and I highly recommend it as I believe it to be one of the very best shows currently streaming.

©2022

Thor: Love and Thunder - A Review

****THIS IS A SPOILER FREE REVIEW!! THIS REVIEW CONTAINS ZERO SPOILERS!!****

My Rating: 2 out of 5 stars

 My Recommendation: SKIP IT. A manic misfire of a Marvel movie. If you are a Marvel completist then save your money and wait for it to stream on Disney +.

In order to set the context for my review of Thor: Love and Thunder, which premiered in theatres Friday July 8th and is the newest film in the Marvel Cinematic Universe – and the Marvel behemoth’s 29th movie overall, it’s important to note that I am an enormous fan of the film’s writer/director Taika Waititi.

Waititi directed my favorite Marvel movie, Thor: Ragnarok – of which Love and Thunder is a direct sequel, and also adapted his 2014 vampire comedy movie What We Do in the Shadows into my current favorite television show of the same name, which is set to premiere its fourth season on FX this coming Tuesday.

The reality is that Waititi’s distinctive comedic style is an acquired taste, and, like the new strain of Super Gonorrhea going around, I most certainly have acquired it.

Which brings us to Thor: Love and Thunder. As exhilarating as Thor: Ragnarok was, Thor: Love and Thunder is disappointing. Yes, it has its moments, but those moments are very few and very far between.

The film’s plot is relentlessly convoluted, and revolves around Gor the God Butcher, a surprisingly subdued Christian Bale, who seeks revenge on the gods for the death of his daughter. Gor kidnaps the kids of New Asgard, who are the perfect dream children for Disney’s human resources department because of their remarkable ethnic diversity, and uses them as bait to draw in Thor and his goofy companions.

The plot twists and turns make just about no sense at all, and the tonal shifts of the film are jarring to the extreme. Make no mistake about it, the film is a comedy, but it opens with a little girl dying and then puts other little kids in frightening peril as a key plot point. The comedic tone and the kids in peril plot mix together like birthday cake at a beheading.

Needless to say, this PG-13 movie is much too scary/dark to be suitable for kids under 13…and frankly, much too shabby to be worthwhile to adults with half a brain in their head.

There are some bright spots though, among them the brief appearance of the Asgard Players acting troupe, which features Matt Damon and Melissa McCarthy dramatizing great moments in Asgardian history on stage. As well as Korg, Thor’s sidekick (voiced by Waititi himself) repeatedly mis-stating Jane Foster’s name…a gag that made me laugh every time. There’s also an absolutely absurd appearance by a hammiest of hams Russell Crowe as Zeus. Crowe’s Zeus is a gonzo piece of bloated bizarreness but I found it amusing as hell.

Another very bright spot is Chris Hemsworth. Hemsworth is so good as Thor it’s simply miraculous. Hemsworth is, of course, buff beyond belief and impossibly handsome, but he’s also effortlessly charming and astoundingly funny.

Unfortunately, Natalie Portman is the exact opposite. Portman returns to the Thor franchise as Dr. Jane Foster, Thor’s ex-love interest, except this time, through some not very clear plot machinations, Dr. Foster is somehow turned into a Thor…and takes the title of The Mighty Thor.

Portman as Jane Foster/Mighty Thor is more wooden than a log cabin and makes a cigar store Indian seem lively in comparison. Portman pushes so hard to be frolicky and fun but she’s so stiff and unnatural that when she attempts to smile, she seems like a cadaver getting a colonoscopy.

Portman may very well be a talented actress, or she may not be, but what she definitely isn’t is a gifted comedic actress and that is glaringly obvious in Thor: Love and Thunder.

Other issues with the film abound. For example, Gor’s villainous minions are these shadow creatures that are so generic and bland as to be ridiculous.

These shadow creatures highlight the film’s other big problems, namely its lack of visual clarity and cinematic crispness, as well as its pedestrian fight sequences…in other words the movie features third-rate action sequences and looks like shit, which is criminal for a movie with a $250 million budget.

And last but not least, the movie, like seemingly all Marvel movies and tv shows nowadays, of course, features some heavy-handed human resources inspired social engineering and woke pandering and preaching. The previously mentioned rainbow of Asgardian kids being a perfect example. As is the cringiest of cringe scenes where Gor calls Portman’s Thor, “Lady Thor”, and she angrily responds “my name is The Mighty Thor! Or you can call me…DOCTOR! JANE! FOSTER!” My only wish was The Mighty Thor aka Dr. Jane Foster had been wearing a pink pussy hat in that scene for affect. That cringilicous scene along with the “female Avengers unite” scene from Avengers: Endgame, should only be legally permitted to be played in voluminous vomitoriums because they’re such gag-worthy, girl-power garbage.

On top of all that, the final act of the film is entirely rushed and completely devoid of any dramatic impact while being detached from narrative coherence.

Due to my love of Thor: Ragnarok and my Waititi fandom, I was looking forward to Thor: Love and Thunder. I was also curious to see if, after the cinematic and creative debacles (and for the most part, box office misfires) of the recent spate of Marvel movies, from Black Widow to Shang-Chi to The Eternals (God help us!) to Dr. Strange in the Multiverse of Madness, Thor: Love and Thunder, with the brilliant Waititi at the helm and the equally brilliant Chris Hemsworth in the lead, could stop the bleeding over at the Marvel money factory that pays for Mickey Mouse’s mansions. I am here to report that it doesn’t.

Thor: Love and Thunder will do fine at the box office, but it won’t signal a return to Marvel magnificence. The reality is that Marvel is in deep shit, and if they don’t realize that then they’re delusional. Their new movies are sub-par, their tv shows are cratering in quality (I’ll have a review of Ms. Marvel out late this coming week – here’s a preview…”YIKES!”) and it is now very clear that the Marvel monstrosity has lost the plot and has their head’s so far up their asses they’re incapable of finding it.

Marvel has dominated cineplexes and our culture for nearly fifteen years, but Thor: Love and Thunder is just one more piece of proof that the bloom is off the Marvel rose and I’m here to tell you that it ain’t coming back.

The bottom line is that Thor: Love and Thunder is nothing but a major disappointment. If you are a Marvel completist, then wait for Thor: Love and Thunder to stream on Disney + in a few weeks or months, and watch it then, because it simply isn’t worth your time and hard-earned money to see in the theatres.

©2022

Looking California and Feeling Minnesota: Episode 68 - Dr. Strange in the Multiverse of Madness

Grab your tinfoil hat and tune in to this blockbuster, groundbreaking episode, that absolutely everyone is talking about, in order to hear Barry expose the most diabolical conspiracy in cinema history involving Sam Raimi and Dr. Strange in the Multiverse of Madness. This is the episode that will change everything, everywhere across the multiverse!

Looking California and Feeling Minnesota: Episode 68 - Dr. Strange in the Multiverse of Madness

Thanks for listening!

©2022

Dr. Strange in the Multiverse of Madness: A Review

****THIS IS A SPOILER FREE REVIEW!! THIS REVIEW CONTAINS ZERO SPOILERS!!****

My Rating: 1 out of 5 stars

Popcorn Rating: 2 out of 5 stars

My Recommendation: SKIP IT. A dreadfully dull stroll through the multiverse of mundanity where Marvel malaise rules the day. If you need to see it, save your money and wait until it hits Disney’s streaming service.

In the wake of having witnessed Dr. Strange in the Multiverse of Madness, the 28th, and most recent film in the Marvel Cinematic Universe, I sat waiting for the usual end-credits scene and had a few thoughts.

The first of which was, if you’re the type of person who unironically uses the term “y’all”, I automatically think you’re a moron. I’m not saying that I’m justified in that belief, just that’s what I believe.

Another thought I had was if you pronounce words that begin with “s”, like “street” or “strange”, by adding an “h” to them and saying “shtreet” or “shtrange”, or if you’re so verbally lazy that you skip the pronunciation of “t’s” in words like “Manhattan”, and instead say “Manha’an”, or if you replace “th” at the end of a word with an “f” and instead of saying “mouth” and “breath” you say “mouf” and “breaf”, then you should drown yourself in a bathtub because you are so fucking stupid you don’t deserve to live.

The reason I was thinking about those rather random things is because a young white woman in her early 20’s sitting near me in the theatre was sharing her opinion of Dr. Strange, or as she called it, “Dr. Shtrange”, as the credits rolled and liberally used the term “y’all” and spoke about how the film was set in “Manha’an” and that it took her “breaf” away.

Unfortunately, “Dr. Shtrange” did not take my “breaf” away, although at various times throughout the movie I was wishing that I would stop breathing and be put out of my misery.

Dr. Strange in the Multiverse of Madness opened on May 6th and, not surprisingly, has won the box office battle its first two weeks, raking in nearly $700 million worldwide against a $200 million budget. Marvel dominates modern movie going and it feels like we all have to pay our Marvel tax a few times a year just to stay on top of the cultural comings and goings, and I am no exception.

My relationship to Marvel movies and tv shows is that I am routinely underwhelmed by them but feel it my duty to watch. This says more about me than anything else, and what it says isn’t particularly positive.

Marvel’s new post-Endgame game plan seems to be to inundate audiences with sub-mediocre movies and tv shows with ever more complicated multiversal mania that are required watching if you want to stay relevant with the Marvel Cinematic Universe.

For example, if you haven’t seen the truly dreadful Disney + Marvel wokefest of a tv show What If…? then you might be a bit lost while watching Dr. Strange in the Multiverse of Madness. The same is true of Loki and even more true of the show WandaVision, which was an ambitious and mildly entertaining series starring Elizabeth Olsen as Wanda Maximoff/Scarlet Witch, the character she plays in Dr. Strange in the Multiverse of Madness.

But rest assured, being up to date on Marvel’s required watch list doesn’t make Dr. Strange in the Multiverse of Madness coherent, it just makes it slightly less incoherent.

The plot of Dr. Strange in the Multiverse of Madness is so convoluted as to be absurd, just know that there isn’t a single universe in the multiverse that is even mildly interesting. This isn’t the multiverse of madness, it’s the multiverse of dullness.

Adding to the malaise in the multiverse is the fact that this film looks and feels cheap and rushed. For example, the visual effects are at times embarrassingly amateurish. Add in a scattershot script, generally poor performances and derelict direction, and you have a recipe for sub-mediocre Marvel movie mundanity.

What makes this movie so disappointing is that it’s directed by Sam Raimi, who you may recall, among other things, directed the three Tobey Maguire Spider-Man movies from the early 2000s. Those films, particularly the first two, were very good and extremely well made (the third one was a hot mess…but two out of three isn’t bad!). Raimi is a quality filmmaker and yet on Dr. Strange he seems to have succumbed to the Marvel virus and made the most sterile and anti-septic piece of incoherent corporate comic book crap imaginable.

To be fair, the first Dr. Strange (2016) film was pretty forgettable too, but this sequel somehow feels even more inconsequential, which is unfortunate.

It’s unfortunate because of a few things, the first of which is that Dr. Strange is actually quite a fascinating comic book character. After seeing the first film I had a reader send me some Dr. Strange comic book titles to read and I thought they were terrific. The character, and his world, is weird, but not weird for weirdness sake. It’s a complex character and one worthy of a decent cinematic exploration.

Another thing that irritates about these Dr. Strange movies is that the films never live up to the stand out casting of Benedict Cumberbatch as the master of the magical arts and former Sorcerer Supreme himself. Cumberbatch’s Dr. Strange is a deliriously intoxicating combination of insecure smugness and aggressive arrogance that is pretty great to behold…but the stories they put him in and the movies that surround him are needlessly vapid, vacuous and abysmal.

Speaking of abysmal, Dr. Strange in the Multiverse of Madness boasts what may very well be the worst performance by an actress in Marvel Cinematic history, which is quite an achievement. Xochitl Gomez plays America Chavez, a young-women who possesses the ability to traverse the multiverse. The dead-eyed, charisma-free Gomez is so awful in the role that it was physically uncomfortable to witness. It was like watching a homeless person defecate under the golden arches in front of a McDonalds and then put it on a bun and serve it to an unsuspecting public.

Gomez’s character, America Chavez, of course speaks Spanish because we have to hit all the right demographic buttons, and on top of that box-checking bit of virtue signaling she also has two mommies. In a nod to Marvel’s supreme subtlety, the name of Ms. Chavez’s universe of origin where everyone is a Spanish speaking Latina lesbian is…the Utopian Parallel. I shit you not. Here’s hoping the woke brigade and their alphabet contingent at Disney can learn Spanish and move to the Utopian Parallel and churn out their shitty movies to their heart’s content and spare the rest of us in this miserable universe their insipid cultural politics.

Speaking of mommies, Elizabeth Olsen is a good actress who was absolutely phenomenal in WandaVision playing Wanda Maximoff/Scarlet Witch, but who is remarkably dreadful playing the same character in Dr. Strange. It’s sort of bizarre, but Olsen’s angry mommy on a multi-versal rampage just feels off here. Olsen seems completely uncomfortable on-screen as Wanda/Scarlet Witch, which manifests by her continuously being completely off-breath and off-voice throughout.

The rest of the cast, including some surprise cameos from stars playing Marvel icons - all of which will go unnamed so as to avoid spoilers, are pretty awful too. One is so horrendous that it genuinely shocked me.

As for the movie’s fate, Dr. Strange is undoubtedly going to dominate the box office for weeks on end and by year’s end will be one of the top grossing films, but that says less about the quality of the film and more about the crumbling nature of the entertainment business and the rapid decline in audience expectations. Such is life in this universe of corporate controlled, crap art/entertainment.

My advice is to avoid Dr. Strange in the theatre as it is most definitely not worth your hard-earned money. But if you’re a complete-ist and you want to stay on top of all things Marvel, just wait for it to stream on Disney + and watch it there. But even then it’ll still feel like a giant waste of time.

The bottom-line regarding Dr. Strange in the Multiverse of Madness is that it made me yearn to live in a universe where Marvel movies weren’t so reliably and relentlessly sub-par.

©2022

Moon Knight (Disney+): A TV Review

My Rating: 1 out of 5 stars

My Recommendation: SKIP IT. A completely forgettable and unforgivable mess of a Marvel series.

Marvel has not exactly covered itself in glory in the wake of the staggering achievement that was the narrative arc which culminated with Infinity War/Endgame.

Black Widow and Shang Chi were rather generic Disney/Marvel movie ventures and Eternals was the worst film Marvel has churned out in its history.

The Spider-Man Sony/Marvel movies have fared a bit better at the box office, but even those have been pretty lackluster films, Spider-Man: No Way Home being the exception. The other Sony/Marvel movies, Venom and Morbious, have been pretty disastrous.

In this post-Endgame era, Mickey Mouse’s minions have tried to branch out from feature films to television, giving us a plethora of Disney + content that has been more miss than hit.

WandaVision and Loki were flawed but at least ambitious. Hawkeye was a more conventional work, but entertaining nonetheless. Falcon and the Winter Soldier was a middling misfire. What If…? an animated shitshow. And now there’s Moon Knight, which is easily the worst of the bunch.

Moon Knight is, like the lead character in the recent sorry Sony/Marvel movie Morbius, a bit of an obscure superhero in the Marvel canon.

Moon Knight is one of the superhero personas of Marc Spector/Steven Grant - a guy with a split personality. Spector is a rough and tumble American mercenary and Grant is an effete Brit who works at an Egyptian museum. Moon Knight is the avatar for the moon god Khonshu when Spector’s personality is in charge, and when Grant is in charge that avatar is Mr. Knight.  

If that all sounds a bit much that’s because it is, and Moon Knight doesn’t do much to quell the confusion.

Moon Knight is, like Morbius, a pretty fascinating character once you do the comic book reading necessary, but also like Morbius, the character is poorly served by the studio’s attempt to take him mainstream because the vehicle used is so atrocious.

The series Moon Knight, like the film Morbius, is an utter abomination it is so awful.

The series runs for 6 episodes, and yet it’s pacing is so bad, its storytelling so stilted, its action sequences so dull, it felt like watching a 40 hour death march.

The series takes its sweet time actually introducing Moon Knight, a fatal error as he’s the only remotely interesting thing in it. Instead, it plays coy with Steven Grant’s perspective, and actually cuts away anytime something interesting is about to happen and Moon Knight is supposed to show up.

When Moon Knight finally does arrive on screen, he is accompanied by the most egregiously choreographed, poorly shot and dismally edited action sequences you’ll ever witness.

And it isn’t just the action sequences, as everything about Moon Knight looks and feels cheap.

A huge problem with the show is that Oscar Isaac simply can’t carry a series on his own, as he lacks the requisite charisma and star power, nevermind the acting ability.

Isaac’s appeal has long eluded me. He is routinely terrible in movies (try watching him in those Star Wars pieces of shit) and yet people fawn all over him like he’s some great actor/movie star.

That said, last year I saw him in the Paul Schrader film, The Card Counter, and I thought he was fantastic. His performance was underplayed, subtle and riddled with complexity. Finally, I began to see what other’s saw in Oscar Isaac…and then… he turns around and churns out the embarrassment that is Moon Knight.

All of Isaac’s versions of Moon Knight, be it Mark Specter or Steven Grant, are dead-eyed, dreadful and dull. By the way, Isaac’s British accent as Steven Grant is Dick Van Dyke level of hackneyed.

Speaking of dreadful, Morbious was a truly dreadful movie and, ironically, the geniuses behind Morbious and Moon Knight are on the same creative page as there’s a sequence in Morbious that is copied in Moon Knight.

In the sequence, there’s a sort of horror chase through a hallway with corporate zone lighting in it where the only lights that go on are the ones immediately above the person walking. It was enormously amusing to me that Moon Knight used the same exact lighting technique in an equally flaccid horror chase scene. Apparently unoriginal minds think alike.

Another major issue with Moon Knight is that the whole Egyptian gods thing is a tough sell, as once you start getting into supernatural instead of superhero, things become even more silly than usual pretty fast. Eternals suffered from a similar failing.

And Moon Knight doesn’t seem to be connected in any way to the rest of the Marvel Universe, so the series feels even more irrelevant. For example, why when giant Egyptian gods are fighting and civilians dying, wouldn’t the Avengers get involved?

To me, the most remarkable thing about Moon Knight is how instantly forgettable it is, and how atrociously made it is.

But rest assured, despite Moon Knight being a major mess, Marvel still managed to get its weak-kneed woke agenda into the series. There’s one sequence where a little Egyptian girl says to Scarlet Scarab (a female Moon Knight-esque character - it’s a long story), “are you an Egyptian superhero?”, and she replies with pride, “Yes I am!” That sequence made me cringe so hard I nearly defecated.

But rest assured, all that virtue signaling garbage is just icing on the cake of awfulness that is Moon Knight.

The bottom line is that if Moon Knight is what the future holds for Marvel, then the future is bleak indeed.

©2022

Looking California and Feeling Minnesota - Episode 61: The Batman

On this special episode of everybody’s favorite cinema podcast, Barry and I don our bat capes and cowls and do battle over all things Batman, first and foremost Matt Reeves' new movie The Batman. We have a heated debate about the new Bat-film and rank our all-time top Batmans, Batman villains and Batman movies, with some shocking results.

Looking California and Feeling Minnesota - Episode 61: The Batman

Thanks for listening!

©2022

Spider-Man: No Way Home - A Review

****THIS REVIEW CONTAINS ZERO SPOILERS!! THIS IS AN ENTIRELY SPOILER FREE REVIEW!!****

My Rating: 2.75 out of 5 stars

My Popcorn Rating: 4.75 out of 5 stars

My Recommendation: SEE IT. A nearly perfect piece of pop entertainment that gives fans all they could ever want.

In preparation for seeing the highly-anticipated Spider-Man: No Way Home, which stars Tom Holland and premiered in theatres Friday December 17, I re-watched Holland’s two previous Spider-Man movies, Spider-Man: Homecoming (2017) and Spider-Man: Far From Home (2019).

Upon re-watching those movies, I found them to be even worse than I vaguely remembered. Far From Home in particular is just abysmal. I share that thought only to give context for my thoughts on No Way Home.

When watching a Marvel movie, one must temper their expectations. You know going in that you’re not going to see cinema on the level of Citizen Kane but rather an attempt at mainstream entertainment designed to maximize profit above all else.

The question then becomes not is Spider-Man: No Way Home a great piece of cinema, but whether it’s a good piece of popular movie making.

Having witnessed the movie the verdict is clear, Spider-Man No Way Home is not Citizen Kane, but it sure as hell is a phenomenal, nearly perfect, piece of pop entertainment.

I believe the best way to see this movie, and I definitely think you should see it, is to go into it knowing as little about it as possible, so I’ll refrain from writing about the plot or even the cast. Instead, I’ll try to describe why the movie works so well without ruining it, or even tainting it, for anyone who hasn’t seen it.  (I will write a more in-depth, spoiler-filled analysis of the movie in the near future after more people have seen it.)

Let’s start at the beginning of this current run of Marvel movies.

Since Marvel’s twenty-three movie Infinity Saga, which began with Iron Man in 2008 and concluded with Avengers: Endgame in 2019 (Marvel claims it ended with Spider-Man: Far From Home but that is nonsense), came to a close, the Marvel movie behemoth has been creatively and financially floundering.

Part of the reason for that is the post-Endgame Marvel movies have often been more interested in preaching from the woke gospel than in entertaining their audience.

For example, Black Widow was little more than a middling movie designed to be a stiletto to the groin of the patriarchy.

Eternals, which boasted both a gay and a disabled superhero, was a miserable misfire of a movie dedicated to “diversity” and “inclusion” over coherence and entertainment value.

Shang-Chi was half of a good movie, but it too was riddled with a limp girl power narrative and empty woke sloganeering.

Disney, which owns Marvel, has obviously gone all in on the woke stuff, and that is reflected in the majority of their films and tv shows.

It’s important to note that while Marvel is owned by Disney, and Spider-Man is a Marvel character, he is not entirely owned by Disney. Sony actually owns the film rights to Spider-Man.

In 2015, Sony came to an agreement with Disney that allowed Spider-Man to be a part of the Marvel Cinematic Universe, and both studios have benefited from the arrangement. But the deal is clear, Sony finances, distributes and has final creative control on all the solo Spider-Man movies.

As explained earlier, the Sony produced Tom Holland Spider-Man movies haven’t been particularly good, but unlike the Marvel/Disney movies, they thankfully haven’t been aggressively woke either.

Which brings us to Spider-Man: No Way Home, which is entirely dedicated to fan service and obviously only cares about giving audiences what they want, as opposed to doing what Disney does which is giving audiences what Disney wants them to want.

Spider-Man: No Way Home is devoid of woke preaching or virtue signaling, and aside from a well-executed running joke that makes fun of Alex Jones and Infowars, there’s no cultural politics in the movie at all.

Instead, Sony delivers a deliriously fun movie that hits all the beats and delivers all the goods. No Way Home is so chock full of goodies for fans it’s nearly bursting at the seams and so gloriously deferential to fan’s desires one wonders how Sony or Marvel can ever follow it up.

Part of how the movie succeeds is that while being deliciously fun and funny it also takes itself and its subject matter seriously. For instance, the film is really about consequences and the permanence of consequences, so every action Peter Parker takes in the film has consequences that desperately matter.

The movie doesn’t try to have it both ways, it doesn’t short shrift its story or undercut its power by softening the edges, it commits to its reality and narrative and sticks with it through thick and thin.

The result is easily the best Spider-Man of the Tom Holland era, and also easily the best Marvel movie post-Endgame. Where it lands on the list of all-time Spider-Man movies and all-time Marvel movies will vary wildly from person to person, but I think it’s safe to say it’s at the very least in the conversation for the top spot in both categories.

No Way Home is set to make anywhere from $150 million to $240 million at the domestic box office on its opening weekend (potentially nearing $400 million worldwide). From my anecdotal observations I think the higher end of that projection is very likely. That is an astonishing amount of money for any movie to make, but when factoring in the pandemic and some people’s reluctance to go to a movie theatre, it’s all the more astounding.

As Uncle Ben once told Peter Parker, “With great power comes great responsibility.” It’s good to see Sony profiting by using its great power responsibly by giving fans what they want with the terrific Spider-Man: No Way Home. Disney/Marvel would be very wise to learn the same lesson.

 A version of this article was originally published at RT.

©2021

The Cinephile with Michael McCaffrey: Eternals

On this episode of The Cinephile with Michael McCaffrey I review the newest Marvel monstrosity Eternals.

Thanks for watching!

©2021

Eternals: A Review and Commentary

****THIS IS A SPOILER FREE REVIEW!! THIS REVIEW CONTAINS ZERO SPOILERS!!****

My Rating: 1 out of 5 stars

My Recommendation: SKIP IT. Just a dismal, dull and dopey god-awful mess of a movie which is in the running to be the worst Marvel movie ever.

The new Marvel movie Eternals, written and directed by Oscar winning Best Director Chloe Zhao, and starring a cavalcade of stars including Angelina Jolie, is supposed to be the blue print for the newest phase of the multi-billion-dollar Marvel Cinematic Universe (MCU).

Kevin Feige, the MCU mastermind who intricately weaved 25 movies into a coherent over-arching narrative that dominated pop culture for almost 15 years, said of the movie, “The impact Eternals will have on the MCU will be nothing less than redefining the cinematic universe entirely.”

That declaration should scare the crap out of Marvel fanatics and Disney executives alike because Eternals is as catastrophically atrocious a cinematic venture as Marvel has churned out in their 26-film run.

The film, which has an ungodly two-hour and thirty-seven-minute run time that often feels eternal, tells the story of the Eternals, a bunch of immortal super-beings sent to earth to protect humanity from the Deviants, a group of vicious, wiry monsters. Superhero movies are often only as good as their villains, and the Deviants are as generic as it gets.

I’d dive deeper into the plot, which frequently jumps back and forth in time, but it’s so convoluted as to be incoherent.

Think of the Eternals as sort Avengers Plus, as they’re more akin to ancient gods than they are to modern superheroes. The Eternals are comprised of Sersi, Ikaris, Thena, Kingo, Phastos, Sprite, Makkari, Druig, Gilgamesh and Ajak.

Unlike with The Avenger films, which featured well-known characters, many of which had already had multiple solo films to explore their background and inner life, part of the problem with Eternals is that the superheroes on display are not well-known to casual fans. So, the movie must try and develop the characters and the audience’s connections to them on the fly while also attempting to entertain. It fails miserably at all of these endeavors.

The blame for these failings falls on writer/director Chloe Zhao, who is utterly hapless and hopeless at the helm. Zhao, who is respected as a maker of small, intimate, introspective films like Nomadland, is completely out of her depth on the sprawling Eternals as she flounders in every aspect of the storytelling. The pacing is abysmal, the character development nearly non-existent and the dialogue forced, trite and overwhelmed with exposition.

In addition, the visuals of the film are flat, the CGI second-rate, and the action sequences dull, unimaginative and repetitive. Every fight sequence features someone being “unexpectedly” saved from sure death by the swift action of an unseen superhero off-screen swooping in at the last minute, and consistently throughout “Eternals assemble” type shots - where all the characters come together in a line in a movie poster pose, rear their manufactured head.

Another major problem with Eternals is that in our age of wokeness and corporate virtue signaling, it seems more concerned with waving the diversity, representation and inclusion flag than with making an entertaining movie.

The wokeness on display in Eternals is so inane as to be ridiculous. For example, in the comics, Ajak, leader of the Eternals, is a man, but in the movie he’s a middle-aged Mexican woman (an uncharismatic Salma Hayek). Latina box checked.

Makkari, the Eternals’ Flash-like superhero, is no longer a white guy like in the comics, but instead is now a mixed-race woman who is deaf for some inexplicable reason, and of course, is played by a mixed-race, deaf actress, Lauren Ridloff. Disability box checked.

In the comics, Phastos is a muscular bad-ass black man, but in the movie, he’s transformed into a frumpy gay guy played by Brian Tyree Henry. It goes without saying that a gay kiss is featured in the film, no doubt used to hit over the head the people too dense to pick up on Phastos’ homosexuality by the fact that he has a husband. LGBTQ box checked.

Considering that Marvel movies are usually populated by beautiful people in skin tight outfits, Henry is an odd choice to play the first openly gay character in a Marvel movie. Unlike his co-star Kumail Nunjiani, who obviously spent an inordinate amount of time in the gym transforming his body to look more Marvel-ish to play the comic relief character Kingo, Henry looks as if he’s allergic to exercise in general and barbells in particular. I like Henry as an actor, but he is woefully miscast in this role.

Speaking of the casting, the usually luminous Angelina Jolie just looks odd and bored as Thena, and the beautiful Gemma Chan is exposed as being rather anemic as the film’s lead Sersi.

The only bright spot was Richard Madden, who was surprisingly dynamic as Ikaris, so much so that I actually thought he might make a passable James Bond should the opportunity ever present itself.

As of this writing, Eternals has a well-earned Rotten Tomatoes critical score of 49%, the lowest in MCU history. Considering all the blatant woke pandering in the film, and critics’ consistent genuflection at the altar of all things “diverse”, the dismal Rotten Tomatoes critical score is even more damning.

Making money is currently baked into the Marvel cake, and Eternals will no doubt have decent box office returns, but the film is the poster child for Marvel entering the creative bankruptcy phase of its self-destruction.

If, as Marvel guru Feige claims, Eternals is the blue print for the next phase of the MCU, then “get woke, go broke” will be made manifest as Disney/Marvel are killing their cinematic cash cow by worshipping the golden calf of wokeness and sacrificing quality and entertainment at its altar.

Eventually, audiences will tire of this type of hackneyed and hollow identity-politics based pandering and shoddy filmmaking, and Disney/Marvel will have no one to blame but themselves.

 A version of this article was originally published at RT.

©2021

The Woke Wet Dream of Marvel's New Series 'What If...?'

The new Marvel series ‘What If…?’ is a woke wet dream where white male superheroes are replaced by women and minorities

The Disney+ show presents itself as innocent entertainment. But its woke agenda is red meat to rabid race hustlers and the identity obsessed desperate to disappear the scourge of white men from popular culture.

‘What If…?’, the new animated Marvel series, follows in the footsteps of the recent live-action Marvel series ‘WandaVision’, ‘The Falcon and the Winter Soldier’, and ‘Loki’ in expanding the storyline of the Marvel Cinematic Universe.

The series consists of nine narrative-bending episodes, the first of which premiered on August 11, followed by the second on August 18, with new episodes available every following Wednesday.

If the first two episodes are any indication, ‘What If…?’ will devoutly pander to the newfound politically correct religious faith of Disney (Marvel’s parent company), as the show’s premise can basically be summed up as ‘What if the woke had a time machine and used it to destroy the Marvel universe?’

The first episode examines an alternative time-line where, during World War II, white guy Steve Rogers doesn’t turn into super soldier Captain America. Instead Agent Carter, a British woman, gets injected with the super soldier serum and becomes the superhero Captain Carter.

Captain Carter not only battles Hydra, Red Skull and the Nazis, but also the greatest villain of all… the patriarchy. She shows her true girl power by overcoming sexism and misogyny from condescending white males in the military power structure. You go, girl!

In the second episode, based on the ‘Guardians of the Galaxy’ storyline, the Ravagers are sent to earth in 1988 by the Celestial Ego to capture his child, Peter Quill, but they mistakenly take T’Challa, Wakanda’s child prince instead.

Unlike the selfish, stupid and white Peter Quill/Star-Lord (Chris Pratt) from the movies, the black T’Challa/Star-Lord (voiced by Chadwick Boseman in his final performance) is so good, selfless and wonderful, he actually convinces Thanos to abandon his genocidal plans and join him on his noble Robin Hood-esque adventures.

The message is clear in ‘What If…?’: if Thanos’ genocidal plan killed just white men, all of whom are awful, then the woke would happily go along with it in the Marvel universe and our own too.

Episode two of ‘What If…?’ so inspired Dr. Jason Johnson, a black talking head on MSNBC, he wrote an article titled, “Disney +’s ‘What if T’Challa became a star-lord?’ is a repudiation of mediocre white men”.

Johnson declares the episode is “a total repudiation of the mediocre white men who’ve been centered in most of the Marvel movie’s blockbuster films.” This is a curious take as Tony Stark was a child prodigy scientific genius before he became Iron Man, Bruce Banner was a renowned physicist before he became the Hulk, Stephen Strange was a brilliant surgeon before he became Dr. Strange, and Thor is a Norse god for goodness sake. There’s not a whole lot of mediocrity on that list of white guys centered in Marvel movies.

Johnson then rants that he doesn’t like movies or TV shows “about selfish, privileged mediocre white men who stumble through life, making costly mistakes that invariably hurt others along the way, but somehow in the end they get to be the hero…”  And yet he was a big fan of President Obama, a selfish, privileged black man who made costly mistakes, like siding with Wall Street instead of Main Street, that invariably hurt others, like working class people, but somehow ended up being a hero in mainstream culture. 

Johnson adores ‘What If…?’ because it shows “what real heroism, through Black guy magic, can actually look like”, which raises the question: what the hell is ‘black guy magic?’ God willing it’s better than the cheesy white guy magic of David Copperfield.

Johnson’s inanity continues with, “White men are bombarded with messages every day telling them they’re special no matter what they have or have not done or earned.”

Are those messages subliminal? I certainly haven’t seen them in the cavalcade of commercials and TV shows where all white guys are punchlines, because they’re the one group that can be ridiculed without fear of cancellation.

As a white male who aspires to the impossible dream of mediocrity, I’ve never experienced this alleged relentless messaging about being “special” regardless of what I “have or have not done or earned”, and neither have any of the other white guys I know.

The irony of all this “mediocre white man” hating is that Johnson is the poster boy for mediocrity himself. He’s an unoriginal mid-wit who has carved out a career on TV and in academia through the sheer force of his kiss-assery and corporate leg-up programs desperate to put a black face on establishment talking points.

He shamelessly belches out mendacious and mindless talking points meant to protect the powerful and maintain the status quo, so that he can keep sucking on the corporate media teat. For example, he once argued with a straight face that billionaire presidential candidate Michael Bloomberg, the oligarch’s oligarch, was “not an oligarch”.

He also got suspended by MSNBC and fired by The Root for calling the black women working on Bernie Sanders’ presidential campaign the “island of misfit black girls”.

It’s amusing that the Bloomberg oligarch defense and the egregious “black girls” statement sound an awful lot like something one of those mediocre white guys Johnson hates so much would say. To Dr. Johnson, physician of mediocrity, I say, “heal thyself”.

As for ‘What If…?’, I’d love to live on a timeline where corporate media clowns and race hustling hacks like Jason Johnson didn’t exist, and where wokeness didn’t ruin everything it touches. Unfortunately, that timeline doesn’t exist, and I won’t even get to see it imagined on some corny animated show either – it’s just too unbelievable.

A version of this article was originally published at RT.

©2021