I sunk hours into NetHack, and I still occasionally dive into the dungeons. I also have a NES emulator on my phone, but it’s just not the same. I’ll play Zelda or Metroid for the nostalgia, but it’s not the same as sitting on the couch with friends.
I just love seeing all the books from my childhood coming to life on the big screen, and being able to talk to friends about comic book nerd stuff. Marvel, at the very least, has been respectful of the source material and given the filmmakers resources to create an interconnected universe. I don’t care if they make a few stinkers as long as they keep trying to make better movies.
Sony and DC both have transparently disrespected the source material and the fans. They have made bad decisions about how to bring those comics to life, and created films that were inexcusably bad.
DC at least makes me hopeful with the new Superman trailers, but I’ll reserve judgement until I actually see it.
I’m hoping we get more Ms. Marvel where she explored the full strength of the Nega Bands.
And the Kree were clearly targeting planets that didn’t just have air and water, they were trying to hurt Captain Marvel. The movie didn’t do a great job at expanding on the idea, but Dar-Benn (had to look that up) was on a revenge mission. I don’t know if it was the actress or the writing, but she was just so forgettable that it was hard to keep track of her motivations. But first she went after the Skrulls, then the planet where Captain Marvel’s husband lived, then the Earth. The fact that she killed millions of Skrull refugees and billions of singing people didn’t seem to bother anyone too much.
But even factoring in all of those problems, it’s nothing as bad as Shazam 2 or fucking Madame Web, I just cannot get past how shitty that god-damned movie was. There wasn’t one single redeeming quality about the movie. Black Adam at least gave us a decent Doctor Fate. Flash bright back Keaton for Batman. Sure, those characters
Neither movie is worth your time, and also those characters died.
Back in the before times, I remember Sony’s deal was that they had to keep making movies in order to hold onto the rights.
I’d argue that Sony was the reason for a lot of the superhero fatigue. The objectively worst MCU movie, QuantumMania, was still much better than Morbius, Kraven, and Madame Web. Some of the “bad” movies, like Eternals, Marvels, Love and Thunder, Multiverse of Madness, Black Widow, received disproportionately more hate than they deserved. As a lineup, it’s all very mediocre, but they were spread out over several years. For fans, they were fun (flawed) excursions into each of those character stories. For non-fans, they were yet another opportunity to gleefully shit on superhero movies to drive engagement or to push a political agenda or just because they think superheroes are the reason we don’t get auteur indie films anymore.
Eternals had too many characters and generic monster blobs. But the characters were nuanced and complex, and the plot wasn’t nearly as incoherent as critics said.
They also had a gay hero and a disabled hero, and they gender-swapped two of the male heroes. Certain people didn’t like that.
The Marvels had a boring villain and absurdly imbalanced stakes during the obliteration of two different plants and their native species. Also, a musical contrivance that I enjoyed more than most normal people.
They also had all female heroes, a female antagonist, and the first Muslim hero in films. Certain people didn’t like that.
Look, if you line 'em all up in a row, it’s basically the food court at the mall. There’s a wide variety of options, maybe one or two that are good, the rest are also there, and some bigots are grumbling about weird people who aren’t like them. That’s post-Engame MCU. Sony is like that kiosk near the court that definitely isn’t part of the food court, and they definitely don’t have the requisite plumbing to have a handwashing sink. Their poor hygiene practices have drawn bugs and rats, and they have a big sign that says that napkins and condiments are only for their customers.
Getting rid of Sony doesn’t make Marvel better, but it does reduce a lot of the strain on the viewing public.
I feel like I’m going to be responsible for Trump sending ICE to raid the Shady Pines community event planning committee that picks the color schemes for their weekly card games.
Which is exactly what Frank would do with the same powers.
Fuck yes. I’ve always said that Punisher works best opposite Spider-Man. Daredevil was a good stand-in for the moral opposition to Frank’s brand of violent justice. Spider-Man isn’t just avoiding murder, he’s actively pulling punches to go easy on the criminals he fights.
It is what was missing from the Thomas Jane and Dolph Lundgeren films. We had lots of revenge violent rampage movies, and seeing the Punisher killing violent murderers in a violent world of murderers doesn’t have the same effect as when you have principled heroes in the same universe.
Disney does not know where it wants to go or what it wants the movies to be. Blade seems like low hanging fruit, but what does an entire underworld of vampires mean for the rest of the MCU? Is it going to come up in Armor Wars? Will Kate Bishop start shooting stakes at fangers? The Wesley Snipes movies had him cut through hundreds of vampires in a nightclub where they had abducted hundreds of victims that they were bleeding for the sprinklers. Shield never ran across some weird bodies drained of blood through the neck?
The one that sticks out in my mind is the original BioShock. Spoilers if you haven’t played it.
The first thing that happens is a voice over the intercom asks, “Would you kindly pick up that weapon.” And of course you do it, or the game does not progress. The voice is very polite and resonable, helping you navigate this dank maze of horrors. “Would you kindly open that door?” “Would you kindly kill that monster?” The calm manners contrast starkly against the modern horrors you’re experiencing in the game. Of course every request seems like a great idea at the time, and of course the game ends if you fail.
Then halfway into the game, you finally meet the man behind the voice and he explains that you are a mind-controlled slave, conditions to obey any command that begins with “would you kindly…” He’s trying to destroy the tyranny of the system and commands you to kill him, sacrificing himself to free you from the control phrase. The “tutorial” seemed like it was just helpful instructions, but you didn’t really have a choice, did you? The majority of players just followed those instructions without question, never considering whether they were good choices or moral actions. And could you say no? Without the wrench, you can’t survive the first attack. Without opening the door, you remain in the first room forever. Your world is pre-ordained and tightly controlled. How much free will do you have in the game and outside of it? At what point do you stop making decisions and start following orders? And when can you stop again?
Sending drugs in the mail is illegal. The point of this bill is to create pretext for seizing data from servers. When they say “dark” they mean “encrypted” and when they say “illegal” they mean “private.”
Spider-Man (Peter Parker) is still white. Spider-Man (Miles Morales) has always been mixed race black and Puerto Rican. Spider-Man (Miguel O’Hara) will be Mexican-Irish. Spider-Man (Hobie Brown) is black, although he frequently goes by Spider-Punk. Spider-Man (Takuya Yamashir) and Spider-Man (Yu Komori) are Japanese, and have been around since the 70s. They are different people who exist in universes with Peter Parker. There are also universes where Peter Parker is Peni Parker (Japanese), Pavitr Prabhakar (Indian), and then there are all the other Spider girls, Spider demons and Spider monsters, not to mention all the Spider-adjacent clones, offspring, and villains who posed as Spider-Man while Parker was incapacitated (which happened twice).
Miles Morales isn’t race swapped, though. He’s a different character. But I do agree with your larger point that Rowling sucks as a writer and as a person, and that race swaps don’t matter if the characters are well written.
I’ve never been a fan of Rowling. It always bothered me how much of her writing was lifted from better sources, but I let it go because the movies were fun and it got kids into reading. Discovering that she has always been a bigot, and her insistence on actively promoting discrimination, just erases all the goodwill she built up.
Case in point, Snape is a shit character. Just awful. People coo at the “always” moment from the movie because it came with a glowing doe dancing around the room, but it wasn’t an interesting or poetic moment. First of all, it’s not something that Dumbledore didn’t already know. If Rowling was a better writer- You know what, no, that’s not the point of this rant, and I don’t have the time to enumerate all the shit great actors turned into gold.
But making Snape a black man puts a lot of story beats into a different context. Was James a racist? Were the other maurauders racist? Did Lily have feelings for Snape and suppressed them due to concerns about how an interracial relationship would affect her standing?
Changing the race of a character isn’t a big deal when the characters are well-written.
Accurate in so many ways
Yeah, the entire story follows the major beats of a group of people playing DND. Everything that happens would be familiar to a player. Your party always gets captured and thrown in a prison from where you must escape. Dungeon Masters (the people running the game) will frequently introduce an overpowered “helper” NPC to move the party along in the right direction, but that character won’t engage in the fights. Parties will find several puzzles that the DM has spent hours creating, only for the party to use some magic or tool in a creative way to bypass the entire puzzle.
To someone expecting standard fantasy storytelling, it’s jarring and weird. The anachronistic language, the character decisions that don’t make sense, the magic artifacts that seem to just happen to be exactly what the party needs in the moment, it’s all stuff that would happen around a table in someone’s basement. It helps to think of each character as a regular person you know today playing a game where they make all the decisions for the character. Convenient contrivances or frustrating failures are the DM having fun with the story. Sometimes the dice rolls 20 and you do something miraculous, and sometimes you roll a 1, trip over a pebble and stab yourself in the face.
You don’t have to be a dnd player to enjoy the movie, but you do need to understand the lens through which you’re watching it. Otherwise, the tone and pacing seem really strange.
I think I still have my google voice number.
I mean, everyone is entitled to an opinion, but you’re wrong. Love and Thunder was, at minimum, a completed movie. The self-parody went way too far, and it wasted what was potentially the best villain since Loki. More Gor and less of an Australian actor trying to do a Greek accent that ended up sounding French. Also, it had screaming goats, so it was not a good movie. But it was a fully-rendered, complete film with some cool visuals and at least a semblance of an engaging story.
Jane is dying of cancer, and becoming Mighty Thor protects her but also accelerates her demise.
What about the nature of power, and who is ultimately responsible when bad things happen?
Is faith justified by the (in)actions of higher beings?
What does it mean to be “worthy”?
Love and Thunder was the third act of Thor’s character arc, where he discovers what is important, and what his purpose is. Is he a hero? A king? A protector? A petulant braggart? A leader? A killer? A God? What does he really want to be? What would he wish for?
He finds the ulitmate boon, the thing he’s been looking for since the first Thor movie, his life’s purpose. He returns “home” fully changed and seeking new adventures not for glory, but to break the cycle of oppression sought by the powerful.
Love and Thunder is not well done, and the message is muddled, but Quantumania is just bad. There are a few funny bits, Paul Rudd is always charming, and Kang was portrayed by a good actor who may or may not be a bad person (not the point of this discussion). But it suffered from the same self-parody problem as Thor, and it didn’t look good. The quantum realm wasn’t interesting, the story was internally inconsistent, ants developed weapons and saved the day because time shenanigans(!?), MODOK happened and was a huge disappointment (I did laugh out loud at him becoming an Avenger), and it all looked like they were rehearsing scenes while they waited for the sets to be done being built. Quantumania was an aggressively bad movie with almost no redeeming qualities or character development. Cassie grows a bit (pun intended), and Scott learns to see her as a young adult (and, dare I say, a Young Avenger), Janet slays some of the demons from her past, Hank learns his wife was fucking tiny Bill Murray, Hope is also in the film, and Kang is set up to be the next big threat to the Avengers Multiverse (except forget that bit because reasons). The stakes could literally not be smaller.
Isn’t it likely that in the microsecond after they all return to human size, the ants developed a whole new oppressive civilization using the remnants of Kang’s technology and their own, subjugated all the subatomic residents, and are a potential threat to the larger universe? Kang was going to escape, why not the techno-ants?
All the post-Endgame movies and shows have been about introducing the Young Avengers lineup. Wiccan and Speed, Patriot, Hawkeye II, America Chavez, Kid Loki, plus Ms Marvel, Phyla Vell, Skaar, and Riri. Obviously Stature will be there, but I would argue that Love is set up to bring more to the table both in power set and pathos.
That’s not to say Love and Thunder was a good movie. But it had good within, and isn’t that what really makes us all worthy?