#NowWatching "Thunderbolts*"

Easily the best superhero movie of the year. And it's not even especially close. "There is something wrong with me. I thought it started when my sister died, but now it feels like something bigger."

"Thunderbolts" begins with the right level of fan service. Fans complain the film doesn't acknowledge Natasha's death, but this is the first we see Yelena.

The important thing to remember is that Warners put “Barbie” on the same weekend as “Oppenheimer” in the hopes that it would crush Nolan’s film at the box office, to “punish” Nolan for daring to leave them.

Warners built “Barbie” as a spite house, like a jilted lover.

https://twitter.com/evermorebae/status/1947585612699058636

Coming to release, Warners scheduled press screenings of “Barbie” against with press screenings of “Oppenheimer”, trying to force critics to have to choose the more commercial picture over Nolan’s film.

They were also, at the time, holding residuals they owed Nolan for “TENET.”

The Roald Dahl books, while hugely culturally important, did not have the single-minded and rapidly-moving machinery of several international conglomerates working behind them to craft movies, theme parks and online spaces to turn them into an augmented reality - or a lifestyle.

https://twitter.com/post_liberal/status/1946261531919798733

If you loved Roald Dahl, you likely read the books. You probably didn’t even read all the books.

You saw a few of the handful of adaptations that existed and were accessible, and not even all of those, and you went about your life.

What’s really great - and what I kinda love about Belinda already - is that she really sets the Doctor up for that, by playing along for a line or two before dropping the anvil.

The Doctor absolutely 100% believes he has her charmed, and so walks smack bang into it.

https://twitter.com/benoitblancfan/status/1911041834945556773

I like the contrast between Fifteen’s bubbly happy personality and the way Belinda punctures it. She knows full well she’s a rebound, and not even for Ruby, but for Sasha.

The Doctor absolutely has “a playbook” for this sort of (platonic) seduction, and she spots it a mile out.

It’s honestly very fun and playful that “The Robot Revolution” opens with the revelation that Belinda is secret royalty.

It feels like Davies playing with the relationship between #DoctorWho and Disney+. Is Belinda a Disney Princess? There is something appealing in Davies using that Disney+ money to construct a world that owes quite a lot to the mid-century science-fiction that inspired Lucas.

Rebels, robots, retro-futurism, even some of the advisors look like Jedi.

Crashing #DoctorWho into “Star Wars.”

Assuming this is an earnest question, I suspect it's the same reason so many people had a visceral reaction against it.

That version of the character earnestly grappled with the anxiety of eroding American exceptionalism in the second decade of the twenty-first century.

https://twitter.com/filmsbypjd/status/1878131672345924030

I'm probably going to regret posting that, because people always have sane and level-headed responses about Superman.

And people are inevitably going to point to, say, Tyler Hoechlin's Superman or whatever, and say he explored the loss of faith in American exceptionalism.

“Joy to the World” was far from perfect, but it was refreshing to see a television show deal both directly and allegorically with the scars left by the global pandemic.

It both justifies Moffat’s old tropes (“the man who stayed for Christmas”) and feels genuine and sincere. It is probably worth noting that Moffat’s mother passed away in hospital after a long illness during production of the tenth season, just a few years before COVID.

So Joy’s frustration about not being able to visit her mother in hospital feel very well observed.

Rewatching “Twin Peaks: The Return”, and it feels like a show about the collapse of any sense of connection or continuity in contemporary American life.

This is true even in the show’s structure: “Twin Peaks” is no longer an ensemble, but a series of disconnected vignettes.


This is baked into the nature of the show. “Twin Peaks” aired on ABC. It dominated the cultural conversation. It was a phenomenon, a shared experience.

“The Return” aired on Showtime, on cable. It was arguably most successful on streaming. It felt like a show watched alone.

Thinking about how Michael Mann’s transition to digital reflected his evolving thematic interests.

Here, two similar types of shot. In “Heat”, on film, the city blurs into a sea of lights in the background. In “Miami Vice”, on digital, objects miles away remain clearly defined.


“Heat” is a pivot point for Mann.

It feels like the last time characters like Hanna or McCauley could truly see one another, when background and foreground could be delineated.

It was the last moment that signal and noise could be distinguished from one another.

This is it. I’m always fascinated by people who are like “obviously, the solution was more episodes or a longer season.”

Because, to anybody paying any attention (or an ounce of understanding of the industry) that was always *fundamentally* impossible.

https://twitter.com/westerosies/status/1822961078004805858

There were obviously some (very) dumb narrative choices in the final stretch of “Game of Thrones.”

But the truth is that the reality of television production meant that the production team were given the impossible task of ending a story the author himself couldn’t end.

The “Downey as Doom” casting choice reminds me of Marvel’s “Secret Empire”, the event that revealed Captain America was fascist strongman who led a bunch of not-quite-Nazis.

It was a great idea, particularly for the Trump era. “Here’s your nostalgic fantasy, turned rotten.” The reveal that this blonde-haired, blue-eyed icon of forties American can-do attitude was secretly an authoritarian strongman had really great potential as a moment of introspection for the comics and the country.

Downey as Doom has the same potential. Nostalgia as villain.

The direct market killed mainstream American superhero comics, both economically and culturally.

When they stopped being things that kids could - and would want - to pick up with their pocket money at the corner store, they were doomed.

https://twitter.com/comicbookaddt/status/1815152326732288026

Very simply, it is impossible to just casually get into comics.

You have to seek them out. You have to research them. You have to find a specific kind of store that stocks them. And they are very rarely designed to be accessible to new readers.

If you want to understand why so much modern franchise media sucks, it’s because this sort of attitude is absurdly common among fans, arguing that putting a character under pressure - you know, “creating drama” - is somehow “abusive” to the actor and “disrespectful” to the fans.

It is so condescending to performers - assuming actors have the same difficulty distinguishing reality and fantasy that seemingly large sections of fandom do.

Also just not understanding how storytelling/production works. Those episodes gave Gatwa time to finish “Sex Education.”

Really fascinating to see a lot of superhero fans who hate Alan Moore holding up Grant Morrison as a creator who writes with “shame, malice or false pretence.”

(I love Morrison, to be clear.)

Have you not read any of their work from the past decade and change? Since around 2011, there’s been a really profound sadness and disillusionment to Morrison’s mainstream superhero work, which is often about the limits that exist within the framework of corporate comics.

It’s really not subtle.

https://twitter.com/darren_mooney/status/1163412517605040129

Broke: "Oppenheimer's politics will be 'wrong' viewed through the lens of Twitter discourse."

Woke: "'Oppenheimer' is likely about how guilty Christopher Nolan feels for reshaping pop culture with the 'Dark Knight' trilogy and studios taking exactly the wrong lessons from it." I don't know if it will be, but Nolan's movies are often *about* his own work. Often specifically the morality of it.

Whether that's the morality of tricking the audience into catharsis ("Inception") or abandoning your family to make an epic adventure ("Interstellar").

It'll be "The Marvels" before we have any real sense of how/if "superhero fatigue" is progressing.

"Guardians", "Spider-Verse" and "The Flash" are exceptional cases in ways that will likely boost their box office. "Blue Beetle" and "Kraven" are exceptional in the opposite way.

https://twitter.com/ScottMendelson/status/1655621552455680000

"Guardians" is a capper to a beloved trilogy. "Spider-Verse" is, as @ScottMendelson has argued, primed to be a breakout sequel starring Spider-Man. "The Flash" has two Batmen in it.

Whereas "Blue Beetle" and "Kraven" would be tough sells to general audiences at "peak superhero."

I adore Jim Starlin's cosmic comics. I think they are massively under-appreciated as part of the evolution of seventies Marvel, and belong alongside the work of Miller or Claremont or Simonson.

Adam Warlock is one of the great Marvel characters, just like Thanos was. The Adam Warlock who appears in "Guardians of the Galaxy, Vol. 3" is very different from the character who appears in the comics.

But, you know what? So was the version of Thanos who appeared in "Infinity War" and "Endgame", and people seemed fine with that.

#NowWatching "The Long Good Friday"

"The Long Good Friday" remains one of the best gangster films ever made. Even just in terms of pure filmmaking, it's a ruthlessly efficient piece of work with a powerhouse central performance from Bob Hoskins. "The Long Good Friday" is also one of the great snapshots of the early Thatcher era, a vision of Britain on the cusp of the eighties, caught between its past and future.

Enchanted by visions of bringing American capitalism in Europe, but haunted by the legacy of its empire.

This week at @EscapistMag, I wrote about the big announcements from Marvel at #SDCC.

As the larger structure of the "Multiverse Saga" comes into focus, we can clearly see its antagonists.

But, who exactly are supposed to be the heroes of this epic?

escapistmagazine.com/marvel-mcu-mul… The "Infinity Saga" had a clear structure.

Each phase had standalone projects, dovetailing into a crossover at the end of the phase, with the scale escalating each time.

Each "Infinity Saga" phase had a movie led by Captain America, Iron Man and Thor.

escapistmagazine.com/marvel-mcu-mul…

Since the big Marvel Studios announcements yesterday, I’ve been thinking about a very niche and very nerdy thing that bothers me about the MCU compared to the comics from which it is drawing.

Head’s up, it is very nerdy and very niche, but it still bugs me just a little bit. So, obviously the movies theoretically draw from across the length and breadth of the source comics.

However, in reality, they are largely driven by the mainstream continuity since around 2005.

That’s where you get events like “Civil War”, “Secret Invasion”, “Dark Reign”, etc.

I feel like nobody has really commented on the fact that Warner Bros. marked the streaming release of a fairly major film with an overt hit piece on that film that was very clearly sourced within the studio.

And not the sort of “gossip” pieces you saw with “Fant4stic”, etc. That’s not conspiracy theory stuff, to be clear. It’s why that story was timed to drop when it did - to coincide with the film’s availability for digital purchase.

It’s a remarkable piece of messaging *from* (not *about*, but *from*) a major studio about one of their own films.