My Top Fancasts of Storm for the MCU X-Men

We all know that sooner or later the X-Men will be joining the MCU, since they’ve been teasing it across several television series and movies for the past year, with the most recent tease occurring in Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness, where Professor X from an alternate universe, shows up as the leader of one of Marvel’s covert Superteams, The Illuminati. It has been recently announced that Hugh Jackman will reprise his role as Logan/Wolverine for the MCU production of the next Deadpool film. It’s unknown if he will continue to play Wolverine for any other films.

I don’t know that Patrick Stewart is going to reprise his role (or even if he will still be acting by the time the studios get around to production, but it would make sense for him to do it and also for the mutants to come from another universe). Fans however are losing it about who they are going to cast as one of the X-Men’s greatest mutants, Storm, the Kenyan – born weather goddess who was married to T’Challa’s Black Panther. There has been a lot of wishing and speculation as to who will obtain one of the hottest roles in the MCU.

I have my own ideas about who I’d love to see in this role, and I wanted to go beyond the handful of Black actresses that white fans only know from social media. Okay, there are two kinds of famous Black actors in the US. There are the A-List famous like Viola Davis, Samuel L. Jackson, and Will Smith, that a lot of white people know because their repertoire crosses a very broad audience, and then there are the top Black actors known pretty much only in Black households, like CCH Pounder, Harold Perrineau, Bokeem Woodbine, and before she starred in Nope, Keke Palmer.

So yeah, I got thoughts about who should play one of my all-time favorite X-Men, who is also one of the most badass and powerful mutants. I automatically eliminated any actress I thought was too light-skinned for the role. Storm was born in Kenya, and her actress needs to not just be a “reflection” of her birth country, but an opportunity for a dark-skinned actress who might not be considered for other kinds of roles. White fans don’t give a shit about that. All they want is someone they know, and they think is pretty, which is why they keep suggesting people like Zoe Kravitz and, once again, Halle Berry.

I know it’s easy to make suggestions for who to play Storm, but it’s sometimes easier to picture them in the role if you see them moving and speaking, so I’ve also listed a few of their acting credits so you can check them out.

Here are my top choices for who I’d like to see play Storm in an upcoming movie.

Yetide Badaki

Yetide is my top pick for Storm because she already has experience playing a goddess in American Gods on Starz, and she is absolutely gorgeous. In fact when I first saw her my first thought was, “That’s Storm!” I can’t imagine her rocking a mohawk, but I’m certain she can pull that off with the same grace as the character Bilquis.

Keke Palmer

Keke is definitely what used to be known in the Black community as Black Famous. If you’re a child of the 90s then you should be familiar with her work as an actor and singer on different shows on the Disney channel. I remember her rendition of Reflection from Disneymania. She is now all-around famous as Emerald Haywood in Jordan Peele’s Nope released just this Summer. So she’s funny, she’s got those fierce action hero vibes, and I can imagine her with a mohawk.

Dewanda Wise

Dewanda has the kind of ethereal beauty that befits a goddess. We saw in Jurassic World Dominion that she can carry an action scene, and she seems poised for that breakout role that so many actors dream about, as she has appeared in a lot of big-name productions (The Good Wife, Special Victims Unit, Boardwalk Empire) without really taking off. Storm would be perfect for establishing her as an actress to be reckoned with.

Moses Ingram

The easiest place to see Yale graduate Moses Ingram’s regal bearing is in Disney’s Obi-Wan Kenobi series. She showed such strong character, command, and gravity, in her role as a kind of reluctant villain, that it took me a minute to get past the character, but I eventually fell in love with this actress a little. Like James Earl Jones, she has a classical acting style, but she is definitely giving off some Angela Bassett vibes, (the Black community had long thought that Angela would at some point be chosen to play Storm, but we got Ramonda instead). But I will accept Moses in the role. The other places she can be seen are in Netflix’s The Queen’s Gambit, and in the Summer Action film, Ambulance.

Ana Diop

Ana Diop is currently playing the alien Starfire in the HBO series Titans, which is a very fire goddess-like character, so she’d be perfect to play a weather goddess, too. Diop is a Senegalese actress and model, with classic African features and bearing, and yeah, if the MCU decided to go in that direction, I’m pretty sure she could rock a mohawk, too. She is currently starring in a Netflix horror movie titled Nanny.

Kiki Layne

Kiki Layne is still a relatively new actress with one of the few credits in which I’ve seen her was 2018’s If Beale Street Could Talk by Barry Jenkins, where she showed her softer side, and she showed her action prowess in Netflix’s The Old Guard, alongside Charlize Theron. This is another actress that is bubbling just under the radar, right on the cusp of big time stardom, and playing Storm would make her a household name. She has the beauty and poise to pull it off, and if Disney is in talks to choose a new Storm, I’d be fine with her in the role.

Dominique Jackson

Now stick with me here. I know that casting a transgender actress in the role is risky and daring because a lot of people would totally lose their shit, but if absolutely anyone can pull off playing a goddess it is the tall, imposing, and elegant Dominique Jackson. When I was watching her character Elektra Abundance on the FX series Pose, I thought to myself, she would be incredible as Storm, and I would love to see it. It would also be groundbreaking to have a transgender actress in the MCU.

Runners-Up

Michaela Coel – Was one of my top picks to play Storm, but has already taken a role in Wakanda Forever as one of the Dora Milaje.

Aja Naomi King – She is a lot of people’s first choice, but I wasn’t feeling it. She’s alright and nothing to be upset about. I just had other ideas. A lot of people like her though.

Janelle Monet – I like Janelle and she has proven to be a competent actress who brings gravity and elegance to all her roles, but I just can’t imagine her as Storm. She comes across as much too young to me, but she is a fan favorite for the role. I don’t object to her playing Storm, I just can’t see it.

Also, there are other fan favorites like:

Gina Torres

Naomie Harris

For the record:

I liked Halle Berry as Storm just okay, but she was given nothing to do, and she wasn’t shown as being nearly as powerful as we know her to be from the comic books. I don’t object to Halle’s acting abilities but she wasn’t really Storm material. I thought she was simply too light-weight to play her.

I disliked Alexandra Shipp immensely. I thought she was a mistake the moment I saw her and have no idea how she got chosen for a role she was too young and ill-equipped to perform let alone who hired her. She simply wasn’t up to par for this character. We need an actress who can play larger than life, who can play a god. Storm, like Wanda, is one of the top-tier most powerful superheroes in the MCU and I never got that vibe from Shipp.

MCU Fight Psychology

Character Fighting Styles

The MCU is well known for its action scenes, especially the battle royale that is seen at the end of Avengers: Endgame. This post was inspired by re-watching Endgame and by the popular meme on Youtube: When There’s a School Fight, which uses MCU characters to show what types of fighters are entering the fray. These memes are hilarious and I can’t seem to get enough of them. MCU fight scenes just lend themselves well to music videos, I guess.

As far as I can tell there are at least four types of fighters in the MCU, Brawlers, Intuitive, Adaptive, and Masterminds. These are not hard and fast rules and you may disagree with my descriptions. There may be more different styles than I listed here, and there are a few characters that fit into multiple categories, but I decided to list them in the style they most often seem to deploy.

The Melee Fighters

Melee Fighters are classic brawlers. They don’t have a plan of any kind when going into a fight. They just run in and start swinging. They are the complete opposite of the Tactician although they are not necessarily chaotic because their fighting style is fairly simple, and is expected of who they are. Brawlers tend to be such hugely powerful characters that they simply don’t need to plan what they’re going to do anyway, and therefore have no fear of being hurt. Brawlers in the MCU are close-quarters fighters who prefer to square up face to face, and their combat style is disorganized and sloppy. They have no need for hand-to-hand martial skills, and many have not mastered any special techniques, and usually don’t need to.

A classic melee fighter is The Hulk, whose fighting style pretty much consists of being angry. He doesn’t need a weapon because is one. The Hulk’s job is to go into battle and…smash! There’s no rhyme or reason to anything he does, but he’s not chaotic in the same way as the Intuitive fighter because the brawler’s behavior is somewhat predictable. Brawlers tend to move straight ahead and hit whatever is in front of them. Because he’s largely invulnerable to attack the Hulk is not worried about developing evasive maneuvers.

The fighters most like the Hulk are Wenwu (The Mandarin from Shang Chi) and Thor. These are characters who have so much sheer power that they don’t need to think in terms of tactics, although it is a talent they possess. Neither Thor nor Wenwu worry about getting hurt or being taken out of a fight, which gives them the freedom to move around a battlefield in any direction they please, although most of the time they just move in straight lines, taking the fight directly to their opponents. Wenwu is a character who has the ability to be a skilled tactical fighter and he is a deeply emotional person but he has only ever mastered this fighting style because he’s not easily defeated. We can see the kind of fight that results when melee fighters go head to head in the movies The Avengers and Thor: Ragnarok when Thor is set against the Hulk. They just run straight ahead and hit something until it falls down.

The parallels to Hulk, Thor, and Wenwu are Rocket, Drax, and Groot. These characters are different precisely because they are smaller, less powerful, and therefore, acutely vulnerable, yet they still approach combat in this wild melee style. These three characters do not have any kind of a plan when they go into a fight, although Rocket is capable of stealth attacks when he is alone, or moving against a greater foe. Drax, however, has no situational awareness, doesn’t think at all, and always uses the direct approach no matter who his opponent is. He just runs in and stabs any body part he can reach (usually in the back) in a wild frenzy. This combat style is in keeping with his mindset of taking everything literally. Direct is the only thing he understands.

Another heavy hitter is Captain Marvel, a being so powerful that most other combatants are entirely out of her weight class. This is a woman who went toe to toe, and one on one, with Thanos. Like the Hulk, she doesn’t need to assess a battlefield. This is not a character that ever has to worry about being harmed or having a plan. She can take down multiple major opponents just by swooping in as she did in Avengers Endgame. She is literally a deus ex machina. Calling in Captain Marvel is like using a nuke on an ants nest.

Rocket is very capable of coming up with and executing a plan if he feels his opponents may outclass him, or he’s outnumbered. In fact, he is known for being wily, just like the species from which he was created, but he seems to prefer the direct approach and shooting his way out of a fight. His use of wild gunfire and using his much larger companion, Groot, as a shield is a tactic we saw him use in the first Guardians of the Galaxy movie. Normally, I would classify him as a Tactician because of his intelligence, diminutive size, and because we’ve seen him exercise his other skills, but those don’t seem to be his preferred method of combat. He seems to find a great deal more joy in shooting things head on.

When engaged in combat with multiple opponents the melee fighter is considered a group’s Heavy Hitter, and deployed as such, creating just enough chaos and being just enough of a wild card that simply dropping them into the middle of a battle can turn the tide as we saw wit the Hulk in the first Avengers movie.

Other fighters in this category: Wolverine is the most famous and a lot has already been written about him, General Okoye of the Dora Milaje of Wakanda.

The Intuitive Fighters

The Intuitive fighter has an almost sixth sense about where to be and what to do in combat. Their fighting style is based entirely on their “feelings” about what to do next and how to instinctively handle an opponent, which can sometimes get them into a pinch that requires them to power it out. Like the melee fighter, they don’t have a set plan, but unlike them, they are even more chaotic in battle because their movements are predicated on what they feel needs to be done next. Picture them on the battlefield, not in terms of lines or circles, but in great jagged bends, swirls, and loops, with no logic. Unlike the Brawler, who doesn’t need or care about situational, or spatial awareness, their combat perception is extraordinary and entirely instinctive. It has to be as they are usually physically vulnerable, smaller, and mortal. They can get seriously hurt or killed if their senses fail them, so that is what they’re listening to on the field. They are also the combat wild cards. No one can predict where they’re going to be or what they’re going to do, because they don’t know either, and unless they have a set goal to accomplish, they simply make things up as the battle unfolds.

If you’ve seen the end of the first Guardians of the Galaxy movie, then you are well aware that Star-Lord belongs on this list. “Dance-off, Bro’!” was an entirely inspired bit of anti-fisticuffs! This is the very definition of the Intuitive fighter. They always do the most unexpected thing in a fight and bring a real element of chaos to the event. Many of them live by the rule that if they can’t defeat their enemy, then they might as well confuse the hell out of them!

Spiderman literally has a sixth sense that moves his body out of danger and sometimes has no idea what he’s going to do from moment to moment. You would expect him to be a melee fighter, and he seems like one on the surface, except Spiderman isn’t especially powerful or particularly invulnerable. He moves wherever he needs to move to be effective or protect himself, and this gives him the ability to fight opponents that are far out of his weight class, like Doctor Strange. He doesn’t really think very much about what to do in a fight. He doesn’t have to because the nature of his superpowers means he relies on his instincts to tell him where his opponent is, where he needs to be, and/or what he needs to do, as we saw at the end of Spiderman: Far From home in his fight against Mysterio. Even going up against Doctor Strange in No Way Home, he manages to come up with a way to defeat him, entirely on the fly.

Spiderman is very strong, but he’s also a child with almost no combat skills to speak of, relying almost entirely on his superpowers and web gadgets. Fighters like him, and the Scarlet Witch, look chaotic in a fight because they will range all over the battlefield with no plan beyond what they need to do at a specific moment, which is based entirely on what their senses tell them.

The Scarlet Witch is one of the most powerful beings in the MCU because she is what’s known as a Reality Bender, and unless you’re a sorcerer too when she steps onto the battlefield, best step aside. She has superb instinctual awareness which tells her exactly where she needs to strike to hit her opponents in their weakest spot, or she simply changes reality to create that weakness. She is also capable of incredible feats of sheer destruction. On the surface, she looks like she may be a Melee or Adaptive fighter, except she relies entirely on her abilities as a sorceress, has no martial or hand-to-hand skills, and her abilities are entirely sensory-based, which is why I put her in this category.

Wanda doesn’t make battleplans. When she has a goal she moves however and wherever she needs to accomplish it, as we saw in her fight with Thanos in Endgame. She is often only as powerful as she needs to be to accomplish whatever momentary goal she has set, as we saw in the Multiverse of Madness, where we see her walk into multiple situations with no plan and still manage to defeat her opponents. She is highly focused, scarily single-minded, and relentless, ruthlessly removing any and all obstacles from her path. She could theoretically unravel the entire world (something she has done multiple times in the comic books just by accident), but the MCU version of Wanda doesn’t seem to have such lofty goals, and because her ambitions are often small and personal. She is also a Tactician’s worst nightmare, as we saw in Multiverse of Madness because, like most Intuitive fighters, she cannot be planned against.. (To date, the only opponent capable of besting her is another Intuitive fighter, America Chavez.) It’s hard to defeat someone whose ambitions you don’t understand, who simply sidesteps or powers through any tactic you invent.

Other heroes in this category are Loki, who could be added but is more tactical than he seems at first glance, Groot, who sometimes behaves as more of a melee fighter, and strangely, the Stephen version of Moon Knight.

The Adaptive Fighters

Adaptive fighters are superb hand-to-hand combat specialists and are kind of rare in the MCU. They are, like Bruce Lee advised, like water, the kind of fighter who changes their fighting style based on whatever skills their opponent displays, and often have mastery of multiple styles. Since they adapt to their opponents, they display multiple styles and are not committed to any particular way of approaching a battle. If they determine that their opponent is a brawler they will adapt to counter that. If their opponent is Intuitive they can use that, but unlike their opponent, their response is based on their immediate observations (which can sometimes be wrong) rather than how they feel. As a result, the Intuitive opponent is the hardest for them to overcome because they need to have some sense of their opponent’s motives or goals and Intuitive opponents are difficult to read. The biggest difference between the Adaptive fighter and the Tactician is that the adaptive person fights on a smaller, more interpersonal level.

One of the reasons that Bucky Barnes is so evenly matched against Steve Rogers is because while he possesses both Adaptive and Tactical fighting abilities, he is mostly adaptive whereas Steve is mostly the other and these are complementary skills that account for how well the two fight together, as we saw at the end of Civil War when they both fought Tony. In their first fight in The Winter Soldier, he and Steve are mostly evenly matched, but since Bucky is also (to some small) degree an intuitive fighter too, he was able to be distracted by Steve’s emotional response. Basically, Steve did something totally unexpected, call him by his old name. Bucky shows a number of different combat modes. Like a lot of melee fighters, he doesn’t always plan ahead. Like the Intuitive fighter, he sets a goal and moves straight towards it, while being both focused and relentless. Adaptive fighters like Bucky are very hard to beat unless you are simply more powerful, unpredictable, or do the unexpected.

Black Panther, as befits someone who has been raised since birth to be the protector of an entire nation, has learned multiple fighting styles, which makes him more of an Adaptive fighter, as we saw in his film. He has learned how to fight in multiple forms of hand-to-hand and melee weapons combat, and also without the nearly supernatural abilities given to him by the special herb grown only in Wakanda. His speed, strength, and flexibility put him on a par with Spiderman, except T’Challa is less intuitive about the use of his abilities in a fight and more of a tactician, as he assesses the skills of his opponents and deploys specific moves to counter them. He is one of those fighters that, on the surface look as if they are another type of fighter, but that’s just how an Adaptive fighter operates, which can be seen in his two matches against The Winter Soldier. He lost his first match to Killmonger because he was emotionally compromised, but later in the movie, he came back better prepared, and while the two seemed evenly matched during that second fight, T’Challa was eventually able to overcome his foe.

Some heroes that are likely to fit into this category are Wong, The Sorceror Supreme, Falcon, whose military training prepares him to be more adaptive than strategic, Nakia, from The Black Panther, and possibly Gamora, who displays a penchant for strategic thinking but most often engages in adaptive behavior during a fight.

The Tactical Fighters

A Tactician is the type of fighter who carefully analyzes the battlefield or their opponent to determine what tactics are necessary to win. The Tactician always has a plan both before and during battle and usually adopts a bird’s eye view of events. They can but rarely choose to do things on the fly and dont like leaving things up to chance. They are the masterminds of the battle, assessing the type of battle, who the players are, and how best to counter them. Where the Adaptive and Melee fighters see things on a smaller and more personal scale, the Tactician sees the grand objective and everyone’s role in it.

All the characters on this list are master strategists, who prefer to think their way out of a problem, and when they are in the midst of a problem, tend to strategize very well on the fly. This is one of the first things we learn about Natasha in The Avengers. Natasha is the kind of person who has plans within plans, and an answer for every contingency. Since she and Hawkeye are entirely mortal and human, with no armor, no superpowers, and no particularly flashy weapons, the two of them have had to keep up with beings far out of their weight class by mostly using their minds. Hawkeye has decided to increase his survivability by increasing his reach and effectiveness with the bow and arrow, and his marksmanship and spatial awareness are unparalleled, hence his name. Clint is not a great hand-to-hand fighter, but he can hold his own against her well enough, and the two are about evenly matched. They both prefer never to engage more powerful beings face to face, instead relying on distance in Hawkeye’s case, and stealth for Natasha.

It is helpful when thinking about these different fighting styles to think in terms of straight lines, or curves and loops moving across an empty plain. In that sense, Black Widow (a highly trained assassin) is the one you won’t see coming, as her gift is stealth. She is a very wily opponent who is capable of assessing the battlefield to see where she can be most effective and she prefers to deflect and/or distract, as we saw in The Winter Soldier. Because of her lack of size and power, she prefers to avoid fighting whenever possible, and for her, no tactic is off the table, including trickery, lying, betrayal, or simply running away. For her, there is no shame in retreating against a more powerful foe, as she did in the first Avengers movie when she knew that her survivability against the Hulk was dependent on how fast she could run. Natasha retreats, so she can regroup and come up with a more effective plan of attack. She later came back with what she called The Lullaby, a way of calming the Hulk’s rage that doesn’t require her to physically engage.

Eats very easy to talk about Tony Stark and Steve Rogers as Tactical fighters because we’ve seen the two of them in movie after movie, so it becomes pretty evident what psychological style they employ. Also, I wrote about the two of them in an earlier separate post, but one of the characters I haven’t talked about much is Yondu from Guardians of the Galaxy, a character I like despite that he’s a bit of an asshole.Yondu displays a great deal pf cunning and mental assessment, especially in his mastery of the Yaka Arrow, a short spearshaped that can change its directory according to certain high pitched whistles he makes. With the Arrow he can take out a roomful of opponents (in GotG 2, an entire ship full) with just a few short whistles.

We have had plenty of opportunities to watch Doctor Strange in action as he literally has, (just like Tony) one of the flashiest fighting styles in the MCU. Like a lot of strategic-style fighters, Steven doesn’t display a lot of emotion during a fight as his abilities require him to be somewhat detached for them to be used, and it was how he was trained. Unlike Wanda, who is self-taught, and whose powers are informed by how she feels, Steven must remain clearheaded in order to put his powers to good use, and as a former brain surgeon, he is highly intelligent. He has a habit of ignoring his feelings in a fight which can make him seem cold and/or callous. Steven is always calculating the odds as we saw in Infinity War. He is daring and willing to make the sacrifice play, though not always to himself. When he is in touch with his feeling his tactics can be risky and somewhat playful, as was just seen in Multiverse of Madness. He almost always has a backup plan, until he simply runs out of plans, but is not above asking for help from his handful of friends (like Wong) when that happens.

Other characters that can fit into this category are usually villains like Thanos, Killmonger, and Agatha Harkness, gray characters with variable motives like Loki, and those with rigidly fixed motives like Nick Fury, and oddly enough, Yondu from Guardians of the Galaxy. Both Marc and Jake Lockley from Moon Knight can fit this category along with the original Sorceror Supreme whose fighting style reflected her calm and somewhat detached demeanor, the polar opposite of characters like Drax and Rocket.

My Least Favorite Superhero Movies

There are so many superhero movies that have been made in the last thirty, forty, years that there are bound to be as many dislikes as there are likes, and here are a few. Some of these will be no surprise to some of you because it really seemed like the creators weren’t even trying to make a good movie, but I did have criteria. To make this list, they had to be movies I actually wasted time watching and hating, and not something I merely heard was bad. They had to be movies that I really, really, wanted to like, tried hard to like, and went into them thinking they would be likable, but walked out disappointed.

Catwoman

Look at that trailer! It looks like the shit doesn’t it?! I mean, I love Halle Berry and will watch anything she’s in, so I walked into this thinking it was just going to be a light, fun, take on the Catwoman mythos, but it was kinda silly, and not in a way that made me feel good. Some people enjoyed it, but when I find myself feeling embarrassed for a favorite actor, then that’s not a good movie for me.

I grew up watching the Eartha Kitt version of this character, who was campy, silly, and very sexy, so I get that there’s more than a little tongue in cheek with this movie version of her. That Halle was playing Catwoman was really the strongest point of the ads, and she was totally rocking that catsuit, but ultimately she didn’t hold a candle to the Batman Returns version played by Michelle Pfeiffer, who still has not been bettered as Catwoman, as far as I’m concerned. (I will compare her to yet another version in the new Batman film I just watched.)

And then there’s the plot. Like I said, I know there’s supposed to be an element of Camp involved, but not only is the plot kind of stupid, involving the use of poisonous makeup, there are more than a few cringey scenes of Halle Berry acting like a cat, and I just couldn’t watch any of that without laughing, and not the good kind of Eartha Kitt laughing, either. I don’t just want to blame Halle though, the other actors in the movie can catch some of this shade too! You’ve got Lambert Wilson, and Sharon Stone who act like they are in a business drama type of movie, and Benjamin Bratt, who mostly stands around looking utterly hapless, as Halle literally runs rings around him. He’s given nothing to do in the script beyond being pretty and flirting with Halle, which he does very well, but he cannot compete with the sheer sexiness of Berry, so his looks are wasted.

I tried really hard to like this movie, but when it was over, I tried to forget that I’d seen it, which is how I try to treat a lot of movies I don’t like.

Superman Returns

I wanted to be excited about this movie. I really wanted to like this movie, even love it really, but it was so ho-hum and bland that I get bored just thinking about it. The stand-out actors were Kevin Spacey (eww!) and Parker Posey, who always brings the madness of Parker Posey (no matter what role she’s playing), and Frank Langella, who turns in an unexpectedly funny performance. Perhaps he thought he was in some other film. I was all ready to get nostalgia’d back to my childhood viewing of the original Superman, but this movie just didn’t work for me.

The two worst actors in this movie were Kate Bosworth, who is quite possibly one of the least interesting Lois Lanes to ever be on a movie screen. She was so bad, I won’t watch Bosworth in anything else. And there’s Brandon Routh, who plays Superman in such a downbeat, low energy fashion, you just fall asleep whenever he’s onscreen. Not only are the two of them utterly bland in their standalone scenes, but they’re even worse when they’re together. I simply was not feeling the love. The two of them had less passion than a couple of garden mice!

I would watch an entire movie about the shenanigans of Posey and Spacey’s characters if I could get past looking at Spacey for any length of time (eww!), but this is what we got, a bland supercouple and some rapists (Yeah, there’s Bryan Singer, too).

Thor: The Dark World

It’s movies like this that make mainstream filmgoers hate superhero films. I mean, it’s bad, but it’s not quite bad enough for me to hate it. I mean, it looks great. It’s got some interesting scenes, but that’s not enough to make me like it. There’s just enough action and drama in it to make me keep looking at it, but I had no emotional investment, which is really sad because I actually enjoyed the first one which was a surprise to me, as I do not consider myself a Thor fan, even though I read the comic books as a kid. This movie is both too little, and paradoxically, too much, all at the same time, and I am puzzled as to how the creators managed to accomplish that. The movie does have a moment or two, and I always like Darcy’s energy no matter when and where she shows up. (She was especially fun in Wandavision. Note to self: Please stop calling this character Darcy Little Badger in your head. Darcy Little Badger is a whole nother person, and an author who looks nothing like this actress!!!) I found the Dark Elves totally uninteresting, and I was not invested in the plot. I did enjoy the end credits scene with the frost monster though!

I am not a huge Loki fan, but I still think this movie needed more Loki, not just because I enjoy looking at Tom Hiddleston but because the Thor movies seem to work best when they focus on the relationship between him and Thor, or just Thor and his dysfunctional family, in general. Those scenes I liked well enough. But none of that is enough to make me watch this movie again.

Blade: Trinity

Talking about some of these films is demoralizing. There is soooo much wrong with this movie, I don’t think I can cover it in a couple of paragraphs. Let’s start with my number one pet peeve, which is the depiction of Dracula in this movie. He gets played up by the other characters to such an incredible degree in this movie, especially by Ryan Renolds character, but the very first time he and the other badass of the movie encounter each other, what does Dracula do? He runs! He runs away!

The other characters are deeply annoying. The dialogue is just *sigh*. The director tries hard to add moments of humor, which fail. We spend an inordinate amount of time with Jessica Biel’s character Abigail Whistler. Why? Wesley Snipes turns in a lackluster performance and I found out that there was some bullshit happening on the set that he was displeased with, and after I saw the movie I get why he felt that way. (He was essentially side-charactered in his own movie, and when the movie bombed, the director tried to pin the blame on Snipes’ attitude, and claim he was being difficult on the set, which I have found out is the kind of thing directors do when they refuse to acknowledge that they f*cked up. *Note: It was actually Patton Oswalt who made the allegations.*) The fight scenes are a chaotically filmed mess and the inevitable smackdown between Blade and Dracula is filmed so poorly that it wasn’t worth the wait.

For example, there’s a blind woman and her son in the film, and it is heavily implied, but never actually shown or stated, that she and Abigail Whistler have a relationship. We are given nothing even remotely overt about either of them, but when the blind woman gets fridged, Whistlers’ reaction is entirely out of all proportion to anything that’s been shown between them. This is the laziest Bury Your Gays Trope ever put on film.

I really wanted to like this movie because I actually like David Goyer, who wrote the first two Blade films. He’s written some really good films since then, but has not, and should never, be allowed to direct another movie again.

*Sigh*

The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen (1997)

This is another movie that had a lot of issues, questionable directing decisions, dodgy special effects, and even some plot choices. First up, I read the book on which this movie was based and it has some things in it that are well, “graphic” I guess is the word I can use. I mean it’s basically about a Victorian Superteam. All the characters are the same as in the movie but I guess since the creators in Holywood were firmly convinced that superhero movies were made for children, they took all the edge off the graphic novel and made it a PG-13 style movie when the book is everything but that.

The second is the use of the characters. In Alan Moore’s graphic novel the Invisible Man is a rapist and Dr. Hyde is a horrific-looking monster, and while Mina Murray (from Dracula) and Allan Quartermain are on the team, it is Mina who is the leader of it, not Alan. The creators of the film also had the idea that they couldn’t make Mina the leader of the team because “woman” and that they needed to cater to white guys by having both the primary lead and his co-lead be white guys (one of whom isn’t even on the team in any of the four books of the series.)

So, the two writers took all the blood and gore out, sidelined Mina in her own movie, which is weird because she’s one of the few characters that have actual superpowers in the film, and replaced her with two guys with guns, played by Sean Connery as Allan Quartermain and Shane West as Thomas Sawyer (Yeah, that’s Mark Twain’s Thomas Sawyer.)

Peta Wilson (Mina) was pretty cool as MIna and I wish she’d been allowed to play her role properly since she was the most interesting character in the movie. The second most interesting character, who had an entire section of the books devoted to his legacy, was Captain Nemo, played by Naseeruddin Shah, a very fine actor. I wanted to see more of him. Stewart Townsend (Dorian Gray) is a horrible actor who kept getting great roles. I actually liked Dorian the character, but I don’t hate really Stewart because he’s at least pretty. There are some great campy scenes between him and Mina that I thought were deeply entertaining, and I wish the creators had leaned into that more. Sean Connery looks like he would rather be somewhere, anywhere else, and Shane West is a nobody to me, but he keeps starring in films I have never watched, so somebody likes him.

I liked Captain Nemo’s submarine The Nautilus. It was awesome! Stupid, but awesome!

I mean, I guess the creators tried to make a good movie? I’m not sure. It was badly executed, and the plot made no sense, de-evolving into a hot mess at the end, only two of the characters were likable to me…I don’t actually hate this movie, but I sure as Hell don’t like it. I kept seeing what the movie could have been if the writers had simply gotten out of their own way, maybe.

Yeah, Imma stop thinking about this one now, cuz it makes my head hurt.

Elektra (2005)

This movie tried it. It really did. It tried hard to be interesting and exciting, and have a plot and character that mattered. I really wanted to like it because it was yet another attempt at a female superhero movie but it ultimately failed. I don’t even think the movie is bad, so much as unremarkable and at times incoherent. Now, remember, this was during the period when Hollywood only believed in the existence of Asian people unless they were whores or villains, and so we got a bland white woman as Elektra because Jennifer Garner was the woman everyone thought was sexy at that time, and all of the white people are the good guys, and all of the PoC are the villains because that’s how shit was before the MCU, I guess.

And it’s not that I didn’t like her. I did. She’s a very good actress and I watched her action-adventure television series in which she played a spy, (Alias), but she was either wholly inadequate for this particular role, or it was so badly written that her charms couldn’t save it. This was also during the time period when superhero movies were just not being taken seriously despite the existence of the Blade and Hellboy films! I don’t know how to feel about this movie other than disappointment, and this isn’t even hindsight disappointment. This is how much I disliked it at the time. I really wanted to like it, and I expected better because I liked Garner, and she showed impressive skills in using Elektra’s weapons of choice. I was bored by the plot which involved the little girl Elektra bonds with, the little girl’s father, multiple assassins, and a brief romantic thread.

This one gets another *Sigh*

Daredevil

I watched this movie two times. I’m trying really hard to remember what this movie was about and have no clue. I think Bullseye was in it but I’m not entirely sure. I have the vague memory of liking the first thirty minutes of the film, and I think Michael Clarke Duncan as The Kingpin was an inspired bit of casting as he was suitably terrifying. Ben Affleck is a much better actor now than he was at the time he made this movie, so I have no problem watching him portray Batman, but I had a problem with his version of Daredevil, who was pretty bland. I can’t even claim the movie was bad. I don’t remember enough of it to say that, although I do remember there is a good fight scene between Daredevil and Kingpin at the end of the movie, but Joey Pantoliano plays a reporter or something in this and he pretty much just plays himself in everything, and some parts of this movie were simply stupid.

I liked the first thirty minutes in which we see that Matt sleeps in a special chamber that keeps out noise and Ben Affleck shows us what it’s like to live as a blind lawyer in New York City. He was fully committed to this role and I appreciate that. That’s it. I don’t remember the plot. I didn’t even remember that Jennifer Garner had been in the film. She was on the poster! I think Bullseye might have been in it. I know Kingpin was present. I don’t remember why.

I mostly didn’t care for Affleck in this role. I don’t know how someone could mess up such a character, and though I really like Charlie Cox in the role, I can’t pinpoint what he’s doing that’s so very different from what Affleck did that I would like one, and not the other. Sometimes there’s no concrete reason for liking or disliking someone in a role. It all comes down to how you felt watching them, and I think that’s what’s going on here. I just didn’t like Ben Affleck very much at the time.

And now I like him okay as Batman. But he’s a much better actor than he was then so that’s a factor.

Hellboy (The Remix) (2017)

I remember being really enthusiastic to see this movie, and I really wanted to like it. Yeah, I really wanted to love it and I watched this exactly twice. Once because I was excited about it, and the second time, to try to understand what the f**k went wrong the first time because I had enormous disappoint! It’s a lot y’all! A lot went wrong.

Okay, I’m gonna need to make a whole post comparing this one to the original Hellboy movie, because wow! The only problems I didn’t have with this movie were David Harbour’s acting, and the visuals. His acting is acceptable and the movie looks gorgeous! The lighting, colors, set and creature design were all satisfactory except in a couple of places. A lot of this movie was just really pretty and even those times it wasn’t it was still worth looking at.

There is a lot going on in this movie and most of what’s happening is completely unnecessary. It’s basically just Hellboy moving from one setpiece from the comic books, to another setpiece, all of it very loosely tied together with the thinnest of threads and plot contrivances. There are scenes that are completely untied to the rest of the plot, and the plot is a lot. No seriously! I’m not gonna go over it because it’s not really possible to explain it. I did like some of the scenes, like Baba Yaga in her chicken-legged house, which was awesome, Hellboy riding a dragon during the apocalypse, and the kaiju-demon invasion at the end of the movie. There are parts of this movie that are beautifully shot, and even the less than pretty parts are worth looking at.

Guys, there are witches, trolls, changelings, Baba Yaga, demons, Excaliber, Merlin, Nimue, The Fae, some knights, giants, a wereleopard, ghosts, an apocalypse, the lady in the lake, Mexican vampires, wrestling, gunfire…really put any of those in any order and you got a movie, I guess. They could have removed at least a third of the characters from this movie and considerably tightened it up. It was like they were trying to cram in as much stuff from the comic books as possible just in case they weren’t going to be able to make another movie.

…there’s not gonna be another movie, ya’ll.

Also, my artistic arch-nemesis is in this movie: Milla Jovovich. I braved this movie despite her presence. I don’t care if she is an A-list actress, or how much other people love her, she’s got all of the acting capabilities of a stick of wood. I’m sure she’s an intelligent and nice lady, and I would love to sit down and have a drink with her because Milla herself seems an interesting person, but she cannot act. It’s sort of the opposite of that thing with the actress who plays Wanda. Wanda can go to jail, but her actress is great and I like her!

Honorable Mentions:

There are a few movies that didn’t make the list because I didn’t have time to write about them but 1997s Batman and Robin is one of them, and Andrew Garfield’s Amazing Spiderman sequel…well I fell asleep on it, and woke up just in time to see Gwen Stacy die, which soured me on the whole movie. I don’t know if it’s any good, but I’m not in the mood to try it again. We can also include Superman 4, because …damn!

And then there’s this one:

Suicide Squad (2016)

Just as with the Favorite Superheroes list, you will notice that one movie is conspicuous by its absence: Suicide Squad. I left it off the top of this list for a reason.

It’s actually one of my favorite movies, but just like The Black Panther, it exists in a class by itself. This movie is too awful to go on the favorites list. I love it though, so I can’t put it in my top ten most disliked movies. I love the hell out of this wildly inconsistent mess of a movie. I can list everything I hate about it, and paradoxically, a few of those are things I loved about it, too. Yeah, Suicide Squad has to go into a category of its own. The top reasons why I love the hell out of this movie: Will Smith as Dead Shot, Margot Robbie as Harley Quinn, Viola Davis as Amanda Waller, and Jay Hernandez as El Diablo! I liked seeing these characters onscreen, I liked a lot of the dialogue, I enjoyed spending time with the characters and I liked the relationships that were developed between most of them.

But the movie itself is pretty damn awful. I absolutely hated, hated, hated, the villain, and the less said of her, the better. I hated most of the other characters except for maybe four or five of them, and the plot made not one damn bit of sense. It’s not even a pretty film. It’s kind of dark and murky looking with the colors all washed out, and it tries too hard to be edgy and gritty, when it should have just fully embraced the utter ridiculousness of the story and characters. Jared Leto’s version of the Joker was very obviously created by an actor trying too damn hard to differentiate himself from the other, better, versions of the Joker and I would like nothing more than to set his version on fire, starting with his teeth.

And yet, I’ve watched this stupid movie multiple times, and I still love it. I will not classify it as a guilty pleasure. I don’t have any shame, or guilt about liking the movies I like.

Of note: The reboot by James Gunn, absolutely SLAPS!!!

Coming up: All-time favorite Superhero movies!

Coming Soon!

I don’t know when I’ll ever feel safe sitting in any enclosed space ever again. If I do, I definitely will not be inviting my mother with me as she is severely immuno-compromised. Technically, so am I, but beyond that, I wouldn’t want to bring anything back home to her. In all likelihood, Dune and Tenet may be movies I’ll have to admire from afar. I hope not because I’m really excited to see them in a theater. If there’s a way t do so safely, while observing social distancing rules…

 

 

Tenet

This is the only movie that would possibly get my ass into a theater seat (which is never gonna happen, btw.) Nevertheless, I am very excited for this. I’m a huge fan of Christopher Nolan’s work anyway, so that was gonna happen. This is the second trailer for the movie, which is aiming for a Fall release. This trailer strongly implies that its about superpowers and time travel.

 

 

 

The Old Guard

I always enjoy watching Charlize Theron kicking ass, and I like the idea of this young black female apprentice, to a kind of immortal being. I’m always for black female characters being shown as beloved, and delicate, flowers in need of being saved, we first need to get our feet in the door, and one way to do that is playing to our strengths in action films.

So far, the Hollywood idea of a strong black woman is measuring how much pain and anguish we can endure, how much abuse we can take and still keep ticking. We need to begin showcasing other versions of black women’s strength. Fortunately we are getting movies and shows like this.

I am told this is based on a comic book, and though I like the authors of the book, I don’t think I’ve ever heard of it before, so I’m going to be looking out for it. The Old Guard airs on Netflix in mid-June.

 

 

 

Da Five Bloods

I always say I’m not into certain types of movies. What I actually mean is I’m not normally attracted to such films, not that I don’t watch them, or have never seen, or liked them. Like War movies. I do have a couple of favorites, (Apocalypse Now, Full Metal Jacket), but most of them I dislike for their reliance on spectacle with no message beyond glorifying life in the military.

I will watch this one because I like the director, the actors, (Delroy Lindo, who I’ve been in love with since Romeo Must Die), and because it’s basic premise, of a close group of Black men returning to Vietnam, so they can find the body of their commanding officer, just sounds appealing to me. I like remembrance stories, or more accurately, anti-nostalgia stories, and there aren’t a whole bunch of war movies which prominently feature men of color, telling what it was like for them.

This is also airing on Netflix in mid-June.

 

 

Gundala

Here’s a superhero story, I’m moderately excited about, set in Southeast Asia, which I’m going to check out soon. I saw the trailer for this months ago, but only recently got the opportunity to see it. This very much reminds me of the Black Lightning TV series, because it’s basic premise, a man of color, with electricity powers , who trains himself to protect his little piece of the world from corrupt government forces, is appealing to me.

 

 

Code 8

This is another one of those gritty superhero stories that sort of chronicle what life would be like if superpowers existed. I kind of like these downbeat superhero movies like Unbreakable, Chronicle, and yes, I include the Carrie movies. I am, however, not always in the mood for such downbeat material, so whether or not I see this ,depends entirely on how I feel that day. I may decide to watch another John Mulaney stand up instead.

 

This one is based on a short film, I saw last year, with the same name. I didn’t care for the Short that much, but the actual movie looks a little better.

 

 

Dune 2020

I’ve been a Dune fan since I was a teenager, and used to the read the first book in the series about every couple of years. It’s one of my few favorite SciFi stories. Yes, I did see the 1984 movie starring Sting. It’s okay, and I really liked it, but it’s not my favorite, and I’m going to pretend the TV version doesn’t exist.

Next year we’re supposed to be getting a remake of this movie by one of my favorite SciFi directors, Denis Villaneuve. I’ve enjoyed quite a few of his movies, including the Bladerunner sequel, so I’m really looking forward to seeing this, as this too is one of the few films that would actually get me into a theater.

The director has been sending out pictures of the cast and crew, and whooo yeah, I’m definitely excited for this version, which looks a lot more like I imagined it from the book. I hope it does well, but I still think y’all should be prepared for a lot of hate because there are PoC working in this movie, and y’all know how white fandom behaves when they think an entertainment product is the exclusive province of white people. There’s also the fact that it is a very loved book. I do plan to stay away from any Youtube videos talking about this movie because already there are a wave of people who are ready to ream it a new asshole before the movie has even been released.

That said, there have been some changes that some people will lose their shit over, and one of the bigger changes is that Liet Kynes is being portrayed by a Black actress. If you remember from the book, Liet is the father of Chani, but is not actually one of the Fremen, and Villaneuve says he changed the role because he wanted to portray a mother /daughter relationship, and the movie was getting very male-centric. Now, if you’ve read the book, you know what role Liet plays in the story and what happens to him ,but I’m still very excited to see what this actress is going to do, and how she will interact with the other characters. In the original film, Liet Kynes was played by Max von Sydow. Jason Momoa is playing Duncan Idaho, who is not one of my favorite characters from the book, but I’m looking forward to seeing what he does with this role.

Oscar Isaac as Duke Leto Atreides

Sharon Duncan Brewster as Liet-Kynes

Zendaya as Chani

Josh Brolin as Gurney Halleck

Jason Momoa as Duncan Idaho

Timothy Chalumet is Paul Atreides, and Rebecca Ferguson is Lady Jessica

 House Atreides

Javier Bardem as Stilgar

Geeking out About: The Watchmen TV Series

Last Sunday was the season finale of the nine episode Watchmen TV series, on HBO,  and I’ve been having all kinds of thoughts. From the first episode, to the finale, my thoughts have just been all over the place. This show took me on a journey, but it was satisfying, and I’m not as angry with Lindhelof as I was when the series began. This makes up for some of his past transgressions, like Prometheus, and the ending of Lost. I was exasperated by some of it, some of it galvanized me, and some of it made me feel really, deeply, some type of way. The plot is a little too intricate to get into here, but I have provided plenty of links, for those who are curious.

First off, the series is a direct sequel to the comic book, and not the much maligned movie from a few years ago. This story (most of it) takes place thirty years after the events in the book, with flashbacks to some periods in between. I talked about the setting  in a  mini review.

https://tvgeekingout.wordpress.com/2019/10/28/october-viewing-list-ii/

 

Review

https://tv.avclub.com/life-on-earth-gets-a-lot-weirder-but-watchmen-continue-1840145375

And People’s Thinky Thoughts:

 

https://www.vulture.com/article/watchmen-hbo-easter-eggs-references-episode-guide.html

https://www.esquire.com/entertainment/tv/a29592776/watchmen-redfordations-racial-injustice-act-explained/

https://www.esquire.com/entertainment/tv/a29565670/watchmen-hbo-backlash-controversy-white-supremacy/

https://www.vox.com/culture/2019/10/20/20919750/watchmen-hbo-regina-king-review-damon-lindelof-race-policing

https://www.thedailybeast.com/hbos-watchmen-pisses-off-comics-fanboys-its-woke-propaganda

 

https://www.motherjones.com/media/2019/12/the-best-tv-show-about-racism-was-a-comic-book-fantasia-heres-how-watchmen-did-it/

October Viewing List

Raising Dion

I binge-watched this entire series last weekend. While it wasn’t entirely what I expected, it wasn’t bad, and I will be back for a second season. It was a pleasant series, not as intense as I thought it would be, pretty fun in a lot of places, with the occasional thrill of tension  in others.

I did go into this with some assumptions based on the trailers. I thought it was going to be a straight superhero origin story, but it turned out to be as much about Nicole, his mother, as it was about Dion.

Nicole was a  professional dancer, now turned single mom, after the death of her husband , and she and Dion have moved to Atlanta. Nicole is one of those people whose life always  seems to  careen from one disaster to another, and when Dion develops superpowers, that just complicates her ability to find and keep a job. When we first meet them, she is still job searching, with the help of her older sister, and she still has not yet told Dion that his father is dead, and won’t be coming home, which is rather heartbreaking. (She eventually gets around to telling him.) Dion’s dad died under mysterious circumstances, and Nicole is still in  mourning, while her sister and her girlfriends do their best to console her.

 

The show mostly turned out to be a mystery, and not the government thriller I thought it would be, as Nicole delves into how her husband died, while he was  working for a Biology corporation. She’s spurred on this journey by Dion’s development of powers, so while trying to figure out how Dion got powers, she is also trying to find out what happened to her husband.

I wasn’t into the plot too tightly, but I did enjoy the secondary characters, like her husband’s best friend, Pat, who starts out  endearingly dorky, and obviously crushing on her, and  great as Dion’s godfather. Later in the series, his story changes, and I wasn’t ready for that ,and I was kinda mad about it. Her sister is one of those likable/unlikable people, who at first, seems super critical, but will totally ride or die for her little sister, which made me like her more. I liked these two characters okay, and Nicole was okay too, although I could have done with a lot less dancing in a couple of the episodes.

The two stand out characters for me though were Dion and Esmeralda. The actor playing Dion is as cute as a button, and Dion is imaginative, and kindhearted, which goes a long way with me. Esmeralda is a gem ,and that actress reallt endeared herself to me. Esmeralda is especially smart and insightful and I was glad to see that the show didn’t focus all her personality into her disability, but it does inform certain aspects of her personality.

Esmeralda uses a chair, and when we first meet her, is around the time that Dion discovers he has powers. He declares that he is a superhero, but Esmeralda reminds him that he isn’t a superhero yet, and has to earn that title. One of the things she says about herself is that she can turn invisible, and this is important, because people’s disregard of her allows her to be especially attentive. Because people don’t pay close attention to her, she is able to pay attention to things other people ignore, as she is the first person to figure out, (outside of his mother), that Dion has powers.

So yeah, I already like the characters, and the show is pleasant enough. There are no world ending stakes involved this season, as the story remains mostly small and personal, which will give the show room to expand, as Dion grows into his abilities.

 

Batwoman

I can’t say that  enjoyed this episode, but I didn’t hate it either. It was a busy episode and I’m still processing it. Let’s just say there is some real potential in the show, and that there is room for some improvement. It was occasionally cheesy, and yeah, some of the dialogue needs help, but it wasn’t actually a bad show, and I’m gonna stick around for the rest of the season, because the action scenes were top notch and I just like Ruby Rose, the actress who plays Batwoman.

I’ve been a fan of Batwoman/Kate Kane fan since she was re-introduced a few years ago, and Rose just perfectly fits this character. Once again, I was not heavily invested in the plot, and I wasn’t  really feeling many of the side characters either,  except for Kate’s bubbly stepsister, Catherine, who is the daughter of her father’s second wife, and is a medical student. Kate lost her mom and bio-sister in a car accident, when she was a child, and she hates Batman because he was there to save them, but left the scene, and Kate watched them die.

We meet up with her while she is undergoing some Bruce Wayne type training with some sassy Indigenous guy, with long White hair, at the behest of her father who, for reasons of love and safety, is trying to keep her out of his hair, after she got kicked out of military school, for fraternizing with another female, her girlfriend, Sophie.

She and Sophie are given a choice. They can reject their relationship and stay in school, or they can be expelled. Kate chooses to be expelled, but Sophie chooses to deny the relationship and stay. At first, I  was mad about it, but Sophie is a Black woman, from a modest background, who worked damn hard to get where she is, and while she appears to love Kate, she is not willing to sacrifice her potential career for her, as she may not get another chance in life. As she tells Kate, she doesn’t have the luxury of being able to take a stand, while Kate comes from a wealthy family, who will always take care of her, and I thought that was a nice touch.

So Kate’s dad sends her away for some training, and Sophie stays behind and gets a job with The Crows, Kate’s father’s security agency, something which Kate covets, but her father gives her the runaround about. When Sophie gets kidnapped by a villain called Alice, Kate returns to a Gotham which has been missing Batman for  three years. Kate is desperate to save Sophie, and prove herself to her father, and we get some twists and turns in the plot, and some fairly emotional scenes between Kate and Sophie, and Kate and her dad. I thought all that  was too much too soon, as I don’t feel we had enough of a setup to warrant tearful conversations, yet.

Anyway, there was a lot to unpack, as the show covers a lot of emotional  territory, along with Kate finding the Batcave, and meeting one of her father’s  security consultants, named Luke, who appears to have no actual security skills beyond having a big brain. We get a little bit of backstory, and a subplot about a traitor among The Crows.

I liked that the show made some real efforts at diversity. There are plenty of poc in the cast, and they all have distinct personalities. There are only two White guys in the cast, Kate’s dad, and  one of the villains, and I find it interesting that shows are doing this thing now where they do cast White men, but only as secondary characters, or villains, the way it was done in Star Trek Discovery. It doesn’t happen all the time, but it happens often enough that I’ve noticed it.

This isn’t my first run in with Kate Kane. I first saw her in a crossover episode with Legends of Tomorrow, a show i still like and occasionally watch, and will be watching this season  because there’s supposed to be another crossover with Arrow, and Supergirl, called Crisis on Infinite Earths.Now, i’m probably one of the few comic book readers who has not read that particular series of books. As I’ve said, I was a Marvel fan at the time of that event, and I could care less what happened in the DCU comic books. I don’t dislike the DCU. All the characters I know are all current, or former, members of the Justice League, Teen Titans, or Legion of Superheroes. Of those characters, the only ones I truly cared about, at the time, were the members of the Justice League.

I will will watch all the shows and some of the movies, though. I’m picky about a lot of pop culture, but  I’m not entirely sure why some things capture my attention, while being indifferent to other things. For example, I didn’t ever give a flying rat’s ass  about Aquaman in the comic books, but I liked the movie version just fine. Well, anyway the big new event this season on the CW is the Crisis on Infinite Earths crossover, with multiple Supermen, which should (and it better) be exciting.

 

 

 

The Dead Don’t Die

This is an exceedingly odd zombie film, which I had a lot of fun watching. Even though most zombie movies give me anxiety, I watch them anyway, because, its zombies, and there was a little of that tension here, but the movie was more comedy than horror. Its not the kind of comedy seen in Shaun of the Dead, or Evil Dead II. Its more of an intellectual kind of comedy, that doesn’t make you laugh out loud, so much as make you nod, and chuckle,  which is the hallmark of a Jim Jarmusch film, really.

The movie has an all star cast of Bill Murray, Danny Glover, Steve Buscemi, Rosie Perez, Tom Waits, Tilda Swinton, and a bunch of others, and is a very oddball film. it heavily reminded me of the movie Rubber, a movie in which a telekinetic car tire goes on a killing spree, in Southwestern America, and if you have not seen that movie, then you probably should. At the very least it will prepare you for watching any horror  movie directed by Jarmusch.

According to the movie, there is a worldwide zombie outbreak because the earth has been thrown off its axis by fracking, or something, but this isn’t important, and barely mentioned in the film. Ronnie (Murray) and Cliff (Adam Driver), are the Sheriff and deputy of Centerville, a small Midwestern town. The first time anyone notices things have gone off kilter is when Cliff notices that the sun has not set at the correct time, and  the town crankypants, (Buscemi), notices his chickens and cows are missing. When the diner is attacked by two zombies, Ronnie and Cliff investigate, and Cliff reaches the swift conclusion that it was zombies.

There are long moments of characters standing around, or sitting somewhere, having bland conversations about the situation, the world, or sometimes each other.The town is visited by what Cliff calls hipsters from Cleveland. Cliff takes a liking to one of them, but its all pointless since everyone in the movie gets eaten, even after Cliff warns them to stay inside and not go out at night because of the outbreak.

The humor comes from the laconic acceptance, by  all the characters, that the town has been invaded by zombies, and from the activities of the zombies themselves.  The director has taken the idea of the zombies being attracted to the the things they did in life, and just ran with it, which results in the Chardonnay quote, seen in the trailer. From time to time, one of regular humans will freak out about the situation, which is only meant to offset the calm of the other characters. This movie is the exact opposite, in mood,  of The Walking Dead TV shows. The zombies are given odd quirks of personality. They still eat people, but they also like tennis and coffee. There’s a country song that plays throughout the movie, called The Dead Don’t Die, and I kind of liked it. When Ronnie asks why that song keeps playing on the radio, Cliff explains  that that is the theme song.

Tom Waits plays the  homeless guy, who lives n the woods, named Hermit Bob, who makes voiceover observations of the events happening in the town, and  whom everyone thinks is crazy.  He’s also the only survivor at the end of the film. I  liked Cliff, who is both pragmatic and intelligent. He occasionally mentions that he’s got a bad feeling, and when Ronnie asks why, he says he read the script, and that things do not end well, which is correct. They don’t. Ronnie is unperturbed by Cliff’s insistence that there is a movie script for their scenario, and that he read it.

Swinton plays the new town mortician who also turns to to be an alien. You could tell she was a strange one, because she  made weird observations, and  carried a samurai sword that she was extremely good at using. She is both delighted and unbothered by the zombie outbreak. Yes, there is a UFO in this movie. From time to time, one of the characters will  forget that they are in a Jim Jarmusch movie,  and behave as if they are actually in a big budget zombie movie instead, and try to do something heroic, but it doesn’t work. The movie ends with the deaths of all the other characters, and  Hermit Bob shaking his head with the  observation that the world is a messed up place.

Movies Normalize the Harming of Black Bodies

Questioning Authorial Intent

I think it’s time we started discussing a writer’s intention in creating marginalized characters. It doesn’t particularly matter to me whether its done consciously or unconsciously, but we need to speak about how writers treat their characters of color, LGBTQ characters, and female characters.

The TV and movie industries have always been controlled primarily by white male writers. They write  women characters  according to what they think women are actually like, or wish they were and we have to be willing to admit that there are more than a few writers out there who fantasize about how they would like to treat women, and realize their fantasies through the characters they create. It’s also an industry made up of a lot of straight men, who have always been prone to homophobia, and who have  written gay characters the way they see them, or wanted them to be seen. And yes, in some cases they fantasize about these characters being  punished for being who they are. (This is something that has been well documented about women, and  Gay characters in movies. See: “The Celluloid Closet”, and documentaries on female characters in slasher films.)

We have all become aware  of the unnecessary rape scenes of female characters, and the Kill Your Gays Trope, where the writers punish and kill women  for being  sexually forward, and the gay characters who lead tragic lives, only to die horribly. The same dynamic  seems to be at work for Black characters too, and the reason why may be the unconscious, (or hell, sometimes very conscious), racial resentment of White writers, who feel forced to include these characters in their work.

I’m not advocating that no Black characters ever be punished or killed, but I am questioning the intentions of the writers who do this, and I wonder if, like the OP above, if it’s resentment at having to include characters of color. More and more often, White writers are being called on to be inclusive beyond white, straight, able bodied, men, and some of them might feel some type of way about that.

Hollywood and TV have a long history of depicting White men bullying, torturing, and gunning down “the other”.  Is it any wonder that it is primarily White men who are the main perpetrators of mass acts of violence against women, (The Ecole Polytechnique Massacre) , gay and transgender, (The Pulse Nightclub Shooting), Blacks, (Charleston Church Shooting), Jews (The Synagogue Shooting), Muslims, (Christchurch),  and others too numerous to mention. (This is not including regular acts of police brutality against people of color, and hate crimes against immigrants, and Jewish people.)

What is new in Pop culture is an influx of Black characters being written by white writers, who think they’re being inclusive, but  who have not done their due diligence on racial issues, or Black culture. Sometimes, I’m seeing characters of color get bullied, tortured, punished, or killed in the narrative by White characters, some of whom are meant to be heroes, and I’m starting to believe that White characters  are stand ins for the writer’s own racial resentment. These characters get to do the kinds of things to Black characters that the writers, whether consciously or not, would like to do themselves, which is sometimes telling off, or hurting, or punishing “The Other”.

I have written before about how Black characters have been traditionally created in the white imagination, often associated with crime, murder, and sexual brutality, (That’s about how racial ideas in the real world get reflected in pop culture). I’m now talking about a different iteration of this theme, and I’m going to use the MCU  as an example, because this is where I first noticed it.

The series The Defenders, is an amalgamation of the other Netflix series in the MCU,  Luke Cage, Daredevil, Iron Fist, and Jessica Jones, (all of which have since been canceled). In the one season of The Defenders, there are approximately two Black men, one of whom is a villain. There’s a scene where he is being tortured by Daredevil and Iron Fist, while the other team members stand around and debate this tactic. What you have is a team of superheroes torturing a Black man for information, and this is being shown as okay, even though real world specialists on this issue, have clearly stated that torture does not work as a tactic for getting information.

https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/we-rsquo-ve-known-for-400-years-that-torture-doesn-rsquo-t-work/

The prevalence of torture, committed by ostensibly good guys, in movies and TV shows, also accounts for the dramatic rise in  the public’s belief in torture as a real world tactic that  Americans should use in the fight against anyone who is considered “a bad guy”. Since Black men are stereotypically  associated with crime…well, you see where this is going.

 

And this isn’t limited to The Defenders, because Jessica Jones contains the scene of the unceremonious killing of the only  Black woman in the show, and Jessica’s disregard for the life of the only other Black character on the show has been duly  noted.  The Punisher, Iron Fist, and Daredevil are all known for showing their White protagonists beating up, torturing,  and killing whole squads of men of color. I mentioned, in a previous post, how Iron Fist had a nasty problem with beating up young Black men, without asking questions first. Even Spiderman tries to get in on the action by trying to intimidate a Black man he needs information from. (That he fails to intimidate him isn’t the point. The point is that he tried it, and that that was his first, go-to, move.) For the record, none of these supposedly heroic characters limit themselves to torturing only Black men. All men of color are fair game, as evidenced by the sheer number of Asian bodies Daredevil mows down, in any season.

Many of the MCU movies have such moments. In Captain America: The Winter Soldier, you have another man of color being tortured for information by Captain America,  Black Widow, and Falcon. In Captain America Civil War you have a scene where Rhodey, Tony’s Black sidekick is injured by Vision, but Tony punishes Falcon,  for an incident that he was not responsible for. In Iron Man 3, Tony threatens the man he thinks is the Mandarin, by brandishing a gun at him to get information. To be absolutely honest, heroic characters of any race often get in on the torture of villains in the MCU. In the movie Black Panther, a movie written by a Black man, there are scenes of T’Challa beating up a villain  for information.

Primarily, this is about the use of torture by any “superhero “, towards men of color. These characters are all still  written by white men, and all these supposedly “good people”  end up harming or torturing men of color. (To be absolutely fair “good guys’ torturing “bad guys” is a problem across most, if not all, superhero comic books, but in the movies, these bad guys have a tendency to be men of color.)

https://www.complex.com/pop-culture/2018/04/racist-moments-in-comic-book-history/

We know racism is real. That is not a matter for debate. We also know that people, in the fandoms surrounding these movies, regularly engage in racist thoughts and actions regarding characters of color, and show a great deal of resentment and hatred for them. What I am questioning here is the idea that, somehow, writers of  Fantasy  TV and movies are somehow exempt from racial resentment because …well, they’re creators, I guess.

And just because the hero committing the torture is Black, that does not make the situation exempt from this criticism, as these are Black characters as interpreted through the lens of  White writers. White writers create these characters, making them say and do whatever they want, including voice their own racial resentments, as what happened with Nick Spencer’s  version of Falcon as Captain America. Nick Spencer wrote a parody version of SJWs, and later Sam Wilson, who had been written as a voice of reason, apologized to Steve Rogers for ever having been like them. A Black man apologizes to a White man for ever having been a passionate activist!

https://www.dailydot.com/parsec/captain-america-sam-wilson-nick-spencer-controversy/

Over and over again, White audiences (which this sort entertainment is primarily written for) are subjected to the concept that its okay for good (ie. White) men to beat up on, and/or torture, Black men.  Vigilantism. Is it any wonder that there’s is so little  empathy for Black characters in movies and TV, (The Racial Empathy Gap), or that White people are quick to make excuses for White men’s violent aggression against Black men.

The most recent case of real life vigilantism was when Trayvon Martin was killed by George Zimmerman, and it was Trayvon who was painted as a villain who deserved to be shot by the innocent Zimmerman, who was just trying to protect his neighborhood. This is how such vigilantism plays out in the real world. How is what happened to Trayvon different from a scene in Iron Fist or Daredevil, which are shows about fine upstanding White men, who just want to protect their neighborhoods.

White America has always told such stories, which often resulted in the beatings and lynchings of Black Americans, when White men take it upon themselves to protect against Black criminality. Two of the overwhelming messages in Pop culture, (books, movies, and TV shows), for decades, is that vigilantism is a perfectly acceptable response to criminality, and that Black men are  the criminals, who deserve whatever violence is meted out to them by White men.

There is a connection between the normalization of brutality against marginalized bodies onscreen, and White male brutality agaonst “the other” in the real world. One of these is a reflection of the other, but which of these, remains the question. And what is served by showing audiences image after image of White heroes willing to do their worst to marginalized others?

Titans (DCEU) Season One

 

I actually liked this series, although I was more than a little dubious about it from looking at the trailer. The trailer for this show should just be ignored. The show has a few problems, but those problems can be overcome.

The show starts with Raven, and her superpowers, being pursued by some unknown agents. She ends up in jail where she meets Dick Grayson. She knows who he is and pleads with him to help her. There are several suspenseful escapes from the people pursuing her. Along the way, she meets Garth (Beast Boy) and his family, the Doom Patrol, in episode four, and eventually, she encounters a superteam duo, called Hawk and Dove, who were also in the comic books, but I don’t remember them, which shows you how little of an impression they made on me. I don’t know if they’re going to have a  spin off show of their own.

It turns out the people pursuing her are the members of a cult that worship her demon father, Trigun, and are trying to procure her to work for them, so they can summon him to Earth. They are unsuccessful for the most part but then, of course, her mother (who she thought was dead), reappears, claiming to want to take care of her, or something. Naturally, since she was the one who slept with Trigun she’s on his side, which is a plot point you can see coming a mile away, but Rachel doesn’t even think about asking her mother why she slept with a demon. So yeah, her mother tricks her into summoning her father, even though Rachel knows she’s probably  not supposed to do that.

And let’s just say the comic book version of Trigun made a huge impression on me as a kid. Yeah, this show version was  deeply underwhelming. I was not whelmed at all.

I think one of the main problems, with this show, is the focus on Raven as a character. The actress makes this character  less than compelling because she simply isn’t a very good actress. I mean she is an adequate actress, who is not good enough to pull off this role,  and I found myself more interested in Beast Boy’s story because Ryan Potter is just better. At every opportunity, the other actors outshine her, and are much more interesting as characters. Yes, even Dick.

There’s also the small sideplot point of Beast Boy having  trouble controlling himself  (along with some PTSD) after he kills (and eats) a man in the form of a tiger, which seems to be his go-to animal. I found Garth’s questions about the nature of his abilities to be much more interesting than anything Raven was getting up to. On the other hand, watching  the two of them  bonding as friends, was really sweet, and Beast Boy is very quickly becoming one of my favorite characters. He was mostly just annoying in the comic books but Ryan Potter’s incredibly expressive face perfectly captures both the sunniness, and the menace, of this character. Most of the time Garth is a friendly and open person, but when he goes to his animal form, he can be pretty terrifying, which is not necessarily something that can be conveyed in illustrations.

Seeing certain characters brought to life, seeing their powers manifest for real, rather than on a page,  has a different effect on how you think of them sometimes. I thought the idea of all his animals being green would be kind of silly, but the way its shown isn’t silly, at all. Potter’s body language really sells it, and you get some idea of how much power this  guy has (especially if you just ignored him in the books.)

I am reasonably  familiar with the Teen Titans comic books, (even though I’m not a DC fan, in general), and the Teen Titans Go TV show. In the comic books, my favorite character was Raven.  I found her backstory, as the daughter of the world destroying demon, Trigun, very fascinating. If you’re a fan of the cartoon, that Raven isn’t all that different from the comic book version, except for being funnier and snarkier. Oddly, the Starfire from the cartoon isn’t all that different either, at least in temperament, from the comic book version either, except in the comic book, she’s a lot sexier, which brings us to Ana Diop as Starfire.

My least favorite character from the comic books  is Starfire, although my niece, The Potato, loves her. I mostly found the character uninteresting, and occasionally, annoying.  I  thought of her as “chirpy”, but then I was a lot younger when I read those. In the show, as portrayed by Ana Diop, she’s a much more interesting character, who, at first, isn’t much like her comic book version at all. She’s kind of broody and dark, but there’s a reason for that.  Its only towards the end of the season that she starts to get more snarky, but she still lacks the sunny, happy go lucky, problem free attitude, of the woman from the comic books ,although she has an incredible smile, that when she bothers to use it, just makes you smile too.

She’s one of my favorite characters on the show. I especially love that everytime we see her, just like in the comic books, she’s wearing purple, and unlike the comic books, her scenes  are always accompanied by disco music, which I thought was hilarious. Of all the characters, she’s the most knowing and mature, while paradoxically, knowing the least.

The Starfire from the comic books is an exceptionally powerful character. which is something people tend to forget. She is a very visually distracting character, because  she barely wears any clothes, (she really does love the color purple, though). She does things in the comic books that I didn’t think about seeing on the screen because I got caught up in how she looks too. I didn’t like her hair. I didn’t like her outfits. Her attitude is different. When she uses those massive force blasts in the show, literally incinerating a roomful of men into a pile of charcoal briquets, that shit is… let’s just say, I was a bit taken aback. This was not what I’d thought about when I thought about her. Like I said, it’s different when you see it brought to life, in this manner.

When we first meet Starfire, or Kory , as the show refers to her, she has lost all her memory, which accounts for the change in attitude, at least. She encounters Rachel and adopts her as a little sister, and   vows to protect her. It isn’t until near the end of the season that she gets her memory back, and her relationship with Rachel suffers for it, which is really tragic because you could see that the four of them, Beast Boy,  Robin, Kory and Rachel were beginning to form a family. I was not impressed by the comic book version of the character but the onscreen version is truly impressive and Ana Diop is doing a wonderful job with it. I can see why she was chosen for this role. (We’re not about to address the racist wtf*ery from the fandom, and  which has surrounded the  character, from the moment the actress was announced. Ain’t nobody got time for that!)

This is not a great show, but I’m interested in the family dynamics at play, and the relationships between the characters, as they develop. Kory and Dick develop a relationship which is canon to some of the comic books, and I liked seeing that. Brendan Thwaites, I have no idea who he is, is an adequate Robin, and it was a lot of fun watching him interact with Jason Todd, the Robin who replaced him.

Dick has some anger issues, and a chip on his shoulder with Batman, which is also kind of true to the comic books, despite that silliness  in the trailer. I have to admit I mostly think of Batman’s various kids as a huge, squabbling bunch of emos, and I would love to see some of the other Batkids in the show. I find it amusing to watch them fight amongst themselves, but they will  still kick the asses of anyone who messes with  their siblings. (Batman has, like, a dozen kids! I have never found that NOT funny.)

I wish the show had been a little more focused and not sort of all over the place, though. Its not that the plot points are not resolved, its that characters (Hawk, Dove, The Nuclear Family,  Doom Patrol, Jason Todd, Donna Troy) are introduced, and disappeared, so fast we barely get to know them, and the characters keep moving from place to place. The show appears to be both moving too fast and meandering slowly towards its conclusion. The pacing needs to be better. It just felt like the writers were trying to squeeze in as many cameos from the comic books as possible.

Marvel and DC seem to have carved out their respective territories with Marvel tearing it up on the big screen, while  the Prime Time TV market  is seems well settled by DC, with 7 to 8 shows airing now, and some 8 more on the way, most of which will be on the DCEU app. (Marvel and DC both  have a f**kton of animated works too.)

Titans is available on the DC app. Ignore the awful trailer and give it try if you can.

Things Are Gonna be Fun!!!

 

I’m only really excited about a few of these, but I can at least respect that other people are very excited about some of the other, LESSER, films!

I kid, but actually I am at least mildly excited for a lot of these movies, although I probably won’t get to see most of them due to budget restrictions,  (cuz I got bills bills, bills, y’all!). I’m reasonably sure I can get Mom to see at least three or four of these movies, though. Some of the ones I’m looking forward to, do not yet have trailers, and some of them have just released new trailers.

 

January

What Men Want (11)

This is one of those movies I’m not especially excited about, but I know other people are going to love. Hopefully, my Mom and sisters won’t rope me into seeing it with them because I’m totally disinterested, probably because I didn’t like the original movie this is based on which starred Mel Gibson. It wasn’t an especially funny idea when he did it, and I still don’t think the idea is funny now, although I appreciate the racebending, gender swapping angle.

 

*Glass (18)

I think I already mentioned that I was going to see this movie. Unbreakable is one of my favorite superhero movies, and I finally got around to watching Split. I was initially dismissive of Split because I thought it was the typical, “lets terrorize some teenage girls” type movie, but it turned out to be something very different, and it was very suspenseful and effective. I love the idea of a superhero movie that’s not presented as a superhero movie, and here we get the supervillain team up done as a Thriller.

What’s more intriguing is how did David Dunn end up in the same facility as Mr. Glass? I thought his life was going well, and he was mending his relationships with his wife and son, but here we find him, locked in with the monsters.

 

February

Lego Movie 2 (2)

I didn’t watch the first Lego movie, but my nephew is crazy about both superheroes and Legos, so of course, he loved it. I’m gonna go way out on a limb here, and assume that he’s going to like this sequel.

 

Alita: Battle Angel (14)

I know there are people excited about this movie. I read the series about fifteen years ago, so I know a little sum-sum about it, but I’m having a really, really, hard time getting past those giant eyeballs, which are seriously creeping me the fuck out. I don’t know if I want to sit with two hours of that shit, even though the trailer kicks ass, and I love the idea of Hispanic robots. Unfortunately it also stars Christolph Waltz, who insists on starring in everything. He’s starting to get like whatshername from The Avengers, (except he seems to know how to stay in his lane).

 

 

March

Captain Marvel (8)

I have tried to be excited about this movie. I want to be excited about this movie. But I feel the same way about this that I felt about Wonder Woman. I’m glad other people are happy about it, and that’s it! The movie doesn’t look bad, but I think what’s hindering me is that I never cared about Carol Danvers in any of the comic books I read. I knew about her, and I liked her in  the comics where she showed up, and she certainly looks especially bad ass in these trailers, but the joyfulness just ain’t there.

There’s so much crossover in comic books that you can’t help but learn the backstories of characters you don’t read the books for. Also, I grew up reading the Monica Rambeau books, so I don’t know who the hell Carol Danvers is. But then, this attitude  isn’t really any different than how I behaved with most comic books. I’m excited at seeing her meet The Avengers in Endgame, but her individual movie is kinda “meh” to me. I felt the same way about most of The Avengers, truthfully. I read the team books, and skipped the individual books, for example, I know everything about Captain America from reading superhero encyclopedias (Nerd Alert!!!), and The Avengers books. I’ve never read a single Captain America book.

 

 

Us (15)

I got nothing. No trailer. No synopsis. All I got is Lupita Nyongo  and M’Baku  Winston Duke are both starring in this movie by Jordan Peele, and its a thriller of some kind. I want to see it because of Lupita: The Black Pearl, and  Winston Duke, who is thiccer than a bowl of oatmeal.

 

 

April

Shazam (5)

I grew up reading the Shazam books, but I don’t know that I want to watch a movie. I liked the books, and I think the trailer is hilarious, but I’m going to sort of vicariously enjoy this movie, I think. Unlike some people, I don’t get tired of certain types of movies being released, because I carefully pick and choose what I’m going to go see, and  just pretend anything else simply does not exist. One of my greatest superpowers is ignoring stuff I really don’t want to pay any attention to, and this movie might fall into that crevasse.

 

 

*Hellboy (12)

Now, this I’m very excited about. I’m a long time Hellboy fan, and I heard that this version is a little more like the comic books, in that its very dark, and kind of gritty. There’s more blood and horror than the Del Toro movies, which I also loved, but the previous movies were more Urban Fantasy with horror elements, although there is a little of the mood of the comics, in that some of Hellboy’s stories were cute and funny. This new movie carries an R rating though. And while I loved the first two movies, I’m still eager to see what the showrunners will do with the characters and story in the remix.

In the past several years, the stories have been very dark though, as Hellboy quit the BPRD, went on a pilgrimage to Hell, and is still discovering things about his heritage that are rather unsavory. Remember, according to the prophecy, he’s meant to bring about the end of the world. There’s no trailer for this yet, but David Harbour (the guy from Stranger Things on Netflix) is killing it.

 

May

*Avengers: Endgame (3)

Yeah, I am jittering around in my bunny slippers for this one. How did you know?

 

 

Pokemon: Detective Pikachu (10)

Outside of knowing several character names, (Bulbasaur, and JigglyPuff), a general idea of the plot of the show, and that Pikachu is hella cute, I don’t know anything about Pokemon. I learned most of what I know from helping raise my two Pokemon addicted  little sisters. I don’t know what to think about this, really. Its really cute but is it aimed at adults or kids? I can’t tell. Its so different from the show that I’m having some trouble wrapping my head around it.

 

 

Ugly Dolls (10)

I know nothing about this movie beyond the trailer being cute as the dickens, and maybe my little niece would like to see it. The plot involves a town full of ugly toys that meet pretty toys on the other side of an immense island. Wackiness ensues!

 

*John Wick 3 (17)

I’m not excited about this, but I’m also not unexcited, if you catch my meaning. I liked the first two films, which I thought were a lot of fun, and its also a joy seeing Keanu back in his element again, as an action hero. At the end of the last movie, Wick was on the outs with the Assassins Guild he used to be a member of, and was being hunted by his former assassin-mates. Also there was some Fishburne involvement, and its just nice to see the old band, from The Matrix, back together again.

I may or may not see this movie, as I may be too emotionally drained from having seen The Avengers.

 

*Godzilla: King of the Monsters (31)

I’m definitely going to see this. I grew up watching all  the Gojira movies, so I’m really jacked about this one which features Gamera, (my favorite, becuz TURTLE!), Mothra, (who was kind of a good guy back then, but looks villainous here), and Ghidrah, which scared the shit outta me as a child. C’mon people! how can you not be excited at the prospect of a THREE HEADED DRAGON!!!!

I finally had a chance to watch Shin Godzilla ,which I thought was as scary as the original 1954 film. It had that same feeling of tragedy and horror. I have been pretending that the American versions of Godzilla do not exist, even though I think this new one is some sort of sequel, maybe. Lets pretend it’s a completely original film, and I won’t have to talk about the possibility of  other American versions existing.

 

 

June

*Men in Black International  (14)

All I know about this one is that it stars Tessa Thompson teaming up again with Chris Hemsworth, and Liam Neeson. Hopefully, this will be as funny as Thor Ragnarok, even though its hard to top that Will Smith/Tommy Lee Jones comedy combo.

 

Shaft (14)

Hmmm? Didn’t we already see this movie come out earlier this year, but without Samuel L Jackson, so it flopped? Well, this one sounds intriguing, as it features three generations of the titular character. I’m gonna make a wild guess and say they’re all named Shaft.

https://www.thewrap.com/jessie-t-usher-samuel-l-jackson-richard-roundtree-shaft-photo/

 

*Toy Story 4 (21)

I’m pretty sure I will end up crying at some point during this movie. I better take some tissues.

 

 

July

*Spiderman: Far From Home (5)

I really enjoyed the first movie, so I’m looking forward to this one. I know, after the last series of Spiderman movies, I said I was giving up on the character, but Tom Holland was so cute and refreshing as Spiderman, that I couldn’t help but like him, so I’m back in. Not only was he a lot of fun, but I really enjoyed his interactions with the other characters, (Ned, MJ), and even Tony Stark didn’t come off looking too much like an asshole.

I’m taking the baby niece and nephew to see the new Spiderman movie this weekend, and although I’m a little late to the Miles Morales fan club, (I was an adult when he was created, and I grew up reading the Parker version), I’m intrigued by the trailer. The past few months, I’ve been catching up on Mile’s adventures with Peter Parker.

 

Lion King (19)

I don’t know whose going to see these Disney live action reboots, but I’m sure someone is happy about this movie. I’m not fond of the animated version, so I’m not going to see a live action version. It looks gorgeous, and that little cub is hella cute, but still,  its basically Hamlet, with lions. But those of you who are excited about this let me know how you liked it.

 

August

Hobbs and Shaw (2)

Those two guys from the Fast and Furious movies, played by Jason Statham and Dwayne Johnson, have an adventure where they drive real fast, while  griping at each other for two hours.

I’m in!

 

Artemis Fowl (9)

People were very very excited to see this trailer on Tumblr. I know nothing at all about Artemis Fowl. I was never a fan, and not particularly interested in becoming one, but I’m gonna take another wild guess, and say that my niece, The Potato, probably knows all about this.

Also the trailer is mysterious and lovely.

 

 

Okay, these movies are too far away to have trailers yet, so I considered not including them, but I am excited about some of them. That doesn’t mean I’ll get to see them, however.

September

It: Chapter 2 (6)

I did not care much for the first part of this, and I wasn’t a fan of the TV version, or the book. But somebody out there likes this, and will pay good money to go see this. I can probably be talked into seeing this by a family member, but I wont take any initiative myself. If you’re gonna see it, drop me a line, and let me know how what you thought.

 

Downton Abbey (20)

I’m much more likely to go see this since I did watch the entire series. I don’t know that I will see this movie, but if I do, I will be sure to sneak some tea and biscuits into the theater, so I can put my thing down.

 

October

*Gemini Man (4)

I like the premise of this movie where Will Smith plays an aging assassin who has to fight a younger clone of himself. I loved Will, as Deadshot, in Suicide Squad, but since I’m not going to get a Deadshot movie anytime soon, this will have to do.

 

Joker (4)

Unlike a lot of people, I’m not put off at the idea of yet another Joker movie, even though I’ve heard there are at least a couple in the works. I’m trying not to be one of those people who constantly bitches and moans about superhero movies being so popular, and so far its working, in the sense that I’m not tired of them yet. I stopped reading the superhero comic books because I got bored, but that doesn’t mean I stopped reading comics all together, because there are other types of comic books. When I get tired, I’ll stop watching these movies.

So far, I’m good.

 

Addams Family Animated (11)

This will be an animated version of the Charles Addams comic series, voiced by Oscar Isaac, and Charlize Theron. I’m not excited about it, but I did read the cartoons as a kid, so I’m intrigued.

 

November

November is so far away (although the way the world is going now,  it will probably be here in a few hours), but I can’t say whether or not I’ll get a chance to see these. I know for sure that I want to see the new Terminator movie, which ignores everything that came after movie number two, and although I grew up watching Charlie’s Angels, I’m not actually what I would call a fan. It was just something I watched on TV. I’m mildly interested in this reboot.

Linda Hamilton will reprise her role as Sarah Connor for this new Terminator, and the rumor is that the new Terminator will be played by Gabriel Luna. Since I’m probably never going to see his version of a Ghost Rider movie, I will have to settle for watching him here.

*Charlie’s Angels (1)

*Terminator Movie (1)

 

 

December

I don’t know what to think of the Masters of the Universe movie. I remember watching the show, because that’s what you did on Saturdays as a kid, but I wouldn’t say I was a fan. Even as a little girl, I do remember thinking the show was ridiculous. Of course, I’ll go see the final Star Wars movie, as I believe I am by law, required.

Masters of the Universe (18)

*Star Wars #9 (20)

Talk Amongst Yourselves: Here’s A Topic

Here’s some reading for your weekend. Some of these articles are not new, but they were new to me when I read them, and I thought they were interesting enough to share:

 

 

*For those of you outside the US, this topic may be puzzling to you. The reason there are so many stories about this recently is because of the progress of technology. We can now clearly document the racism that Black people (and other marginalized groups) are on the receiving end of in this country. (This article lists several.)

Sadly, the only takeaway that a lot of White people get from the widely publicized police shootings of unarmed Black men, is that they can call the police, who will then come and punish us, or remove us, and there is a very clear reason that  many of these incidents have been instigated by White women. In a few of these cases, it is made  clear by the participants, that the reason they’re calling the police, is that they hope we will be killed. 

The bottom line is that White supremacy is not the sole province of White men. White women are not innocent, and have been willing, sometimes eager, participants in its practice.

https://www.damemagazine.com/2018/07/30/white-women-arent-afraid-of-black-people-they-want-pretty-power/

There’s a long history of white women harassing Black people and getting cops to arrest them. The only danger they feel is of losing their place within the white patriarchy.

 

 

 

*This is an analysis of the types of gender roles played in superhero movies:

https://adanewmedia.org/2016/10/issue10-miller-rauch-kaplan/

This study examined full-length superhero movies to determine if there are gender differences in characters’ roles, appearances, and violence.

 

 

*A lot of Black superheroes are strictly small time. Its interesting that superheroes written by White men are only ever tasked with taking care of their immediate environment, which is almost always a crime- ridden neighborhood in the inner city. This is not to negate the existence of Cosmic and Planetary  superheroes, but that there are so many of them willing to forgo protecting the planet, or the galaxy, in favor of just hanging out in the ‘hood, is something I hadn’t noticed before.

https://www.theatlantic.com/entertainment/archive/2014/11/black-superheros/383042/

Traditionally, movies have done a curious thing with black heroes: Charge them not with saving the world, but rather with protecting their immediate, ethno-specific domains, or, in many cases, to put it bluntly, the ghetto.

 

 

 

*This has been an issue since the passing of the Civil Rights Act. Before that, Asian people had largely been vilified in the media, and by politicians, as a menace, or as not really being American. After the passing of the CRA there was a concerted effort to use the achievements of certain ethnicity of Asian Americans to make backhanded slaps at Black people, in an attempt to negate the effects of White supremacist policies on both groups.

https://www.npr.org/sections/codeswitch/2017/04/19/524571669/model-minority-myth-again-used-as-a-racial-wedge-between-asians-and-blacks

Since the end of World War II, many white people have used Asian-Americans and their perceived collective success as a racial wedge. The effect? Minimizing the role racism plays in the persistent struggles of other racial/ethnic minority groups — especially black Americans.

 

 

*I had a long rant ready about the whininess of comedians who claim political correctness has destroyed their careers, but this article states what I wanted to say clearly enough. What they are complaining about is simply what happens to older comedians who can’t adapt to the times.

http://www.latimes.com/opinion/op-ed/la-oe-0616-rabin-seinfeld-pc-20150616-story.html

Comedy increasingly is taking the form of a conversation rather than a one-way expression of ideas and information, and cranky older comedians who opt out of this dialogue risk becoming relics of an earlier era.

 

 

 

*This made me think about a lot of the art created by marginalized groups in hte US ,and how so much of it is created to uplift the self- esteem of the group. What Gadsby says she was doing in her stand-up is the exact opposite of rap music, for example. There is no such thing as self- deprecating rap music. I thought of this because I had been listening to Django Jane ,and how that is an anthem for QPoC, and the things Janelle Monae says about herself in that song, are a celebration of her strength, and identity, and it makes me wonder if Gadsby’s approach to stand-up, has more to do with being Tanzanian rather than American. or if its just her own introverted personality at work.

 Here, you have two very different women, both of them somewhere along the LGBTQ spectrum, one White and Non- American, and the other American born, and you have two very different philosophical approaches to their performances. Gadsby claims her self- deprecation was the price she paid for speaking, as if she needed permission to talk about her life, and could only do so by making herself smaller. This does not seem to be the case with Janelle, who creates art that celebrates herself. Janelle doesn’t ask permission. She is  telling the listener how wonderful she is, which is  one of the major components of a form of music that was created by an often denigrated, and marginalized group of people. Such a form of humility may have served Gadsby in the environment that produced it,  but Black Americans can’t afford to be humble.

http://observer.com/2018/08/film-crit-hulk-hannah-gadsby-rejects-the-premise/

“Do you understand what self-depreciation means when it comes from someone who already exists in the margins?” She asks, “it’s not humility, it’s humiliation.” And Gadsby was done having her very identity being a source of tension. She was done cutting herself down. She was done humiliating herself.

 

 

 

*I’ve watched a lot of Science Fiction and its interesting how many or how few  characters with disabilities are present, and how little accommodation is made for them. I cannot recall any stairs on Star Trek, but I also didn’t notice if other accommodations had been made for hearing, height, or sight disabilities. I’m going to have to re-watch a lot of my favorites, and make  notes.

http://www.scifipulse.net/turning-a-blind-eye-physical-disabilities-in-sci-fi-fantasy-entertainment/

https://io9.gizmodo.com/staircases-in-space-why-are-places-in-science-fiction-1827966642

Our real world is a remarkably inaccessible place. I haven’t made it to a movie theater on opening night in years without running into a plethora of issues, from broken captioning devices to nondisabled people sitting in seats for wheelchair users and their companions, to theaters that are physically inaccessible to me because of those dang steps and staircases.

 

 

*Thandie Newton, from Westworld, has a lot to say about diversity in SciFi:

 

Your character Maeve in HBO’s “Westworld” is an android or “host” in a theme park. What do you think it means to have characters of color in genre work? A lot of what’s in the mainstream doesn’t have people of color. What irritates me is that science fiction is the place where you could have us. Science fiction is a projection of a time that hasn’t even happened, so if you don’t populate that place with people of different skin tones, shame on you.

Black Lightning The Review

So this review is going to be a little unusual because I’m going to talk about my Mom first. If you’ve been reading this blog then you know that she has had a huge influence over my tastes in pop culture and we often enjoy movies and TV shows together.

One of the things we really  didn’t enjoy together, very much, was comic books. I know she has read them, but she pretty much stuck to Archie and Peanuts, and those were the comics I was introduced to as a little girl. I went from there to Marvel, where I read Conan and Red Sonja, and then superheroes in the 80s and 90s. My Mom pretty much stopped reading comics, and moved on to paperbacks.

So, while my Mom does know something about superheroes like Batman and Superman, whom she disdains for some reason, and I do remember watching Wonder Woman, and The Incredible Hulk with her, when I was a kid, she is not specifically a fan of superheroes, really. I couldn’t get her to watch Captain America, Daredevil, The Defenders or Spiderman, but I did get her to watch Luke Cage, which I consider a success. Apparently, if its a Black superhero, she will watch it, because she also really loved Blade, and seems to be looking forward to Black Panther. She binge-watched (for the first time) Luke Cage, the weekend after it aired.

Basically, I know my the kind of stuff she likes, so I tried to sell her on Black Lightning. I was only slightly nervous, because I wasn’t absolutely sure she would like it. I told her it was like Luke Cage, which I think she maybe watched too fast, because she only has vague memories of really enjoying it. (I did inform her there would be a season two of the show this summer.)

I don’t know why I was so nervous though, because I should’ve remembered that she loved Blade, and yeah,  she loved Black Lightning. She mostly really got into the action scenes., which I have to admit were very exciting.  Now, anytime I can get my 67 year old Mom to watch a superhero show on the CW, it must be compelling. I have to tell you, my Mom is what you might call, an enthusiastic television viewer. She is very loud and vocal about what she is liking on the screen, and this was the case with Black Lightning. The loud whoops, and cheers I heard coming from her part of the house, was more than enough to vindicate my decision. She was even giddy enough to try to tell me about the episode afterwards, even though I told her I’d already watched it! I was getting a tiny bit worried because she was very worked up about Anissa having superpowers.

I had already watched the episode the night it aired, and recorded it on the DVR. Wednesday nights are her dialysis evenings, and after her session is over she likes to watch a couple of hours of TV and fall asleep. So now she’s excited to watch 9-1-1 on Wednesday nights, and Black Lightning on Tuesdays.

As for Black Lightning, I did very much enjoy it. Its very possibly one of the most unapologetically Black things on TV, or at least on the CW.  From the dialogue, to the plot, and music, there’s a lot of cultural relevance in it for Black audiences, and this appears to have worked because the show got good reviews. I was not wrong in comparing it to Luke Cage, because the plot is very reminiscent of that show. The show isn’t related to any  of the other superhero shows on the CW. Meaning it doesn’t take place in the same universe as Arrow or Legends of Tomorrow. Nevertheless, I’m really glad a lot of non-Black viewers came out in support of the show, and seemed to enjoy it. too.

Jefferson Pierce is Black Lightning, a high school principal, who  has been  retired from the superhero/vigilante lifestyle for some nine years. He is separated from his wife, with whom he has joint custody of their two daughters,. One of his daughters, Anissa, is a part-time  sex education teacher at the school (so viewers will definitely be receiving some sex education this season, along with history lessons), and the other, Jennifer, is one of the top students at the school. When Jennifer falls into the company of a local gangbanger, who threatens her, and her sister’s  life, their father has to come out of retirement to rescue them both.

As I’ve said before, I’m always here for some Black girl damseling, but that isn’t all we’re in for though, as it turns out that Anissa also has superpowers. She can change her physical density, which gives her speed and strength. In the comic books, her superhero name is Thunder, and her little sister, who has powers much like her father, is known as Lightning. (She has the ability to transform her body into lightning, which is all kinds of awesomeness). I haven’t read much about either of them in the comic books, even though I was a fan of Batman and the Outsiders in the early nineties. I first encountered Thunder in a story where she was fighting with her dad about choosing the superhero lifestyle. She is currently a member of The Outsiders. I suspect that title  is going to become very popular after this show.

Black Lightning and Luke Cage (Misty Knight) will be only two of three shows, that I know of, which will feature Black female superheroes.  The other show is Legends of Tomorrow with Vixen. It will have the groundbreaking distinction of being the only show on television with a Black lesbian superhero (in the comic books Thunder is the partner of superhero  Grace Choi, who is being played by Chantal Thuy) This is notable for two reasons. Grace Choi will be the only Asian (Vietnamese/Canadian) lesbian superhero on TV, as part of an interracial couple, (where neither partner is White),  which is pretty rare.

 

Another thing I liked about this show was the relationships.  We see a positive ex-wife/husband relationship. They act like mature adults who talk to each other about their lives, and raising their daughters. Its evident that Jefferson and his ex-wife still love each other, but for some reason feel they can’t be together.We get to see a positive family dynamic between a father and his two daughters, and we get to see a loving and supportive relationship between two sisters, which is also interesting on TV, as there are rarely more than one or two WoC in any narrative.

My Mom seemed especially interested and excited at the idea that the daughters have superpowers. She was very vocal about it at any rate. Which kind of saddens me, because sometimes a person doesn’t know they need something until they’ve seen it. She’s probably wanted to see Black women with superpowers her whole life. And it was not until we started getting Black directors and content creators, that she got the chance to see it. I read comic books as a kid, so I had Storm, but my Mom had none of this growing up.

http://www.latimes.com/entertainment/la-et-comic-con-2017-black-lightening-won-t-avoid-social-1500782478-htmlstory.html

So I just want to give a shout-out to the Black  men content creators, who have not forgotten that their “sistahs” exist, and want to see representation for themselves. We want to see ourselves kicking  ass and having adventures too. Ryan Coogler, (The Dora Milaje), Cheo Hodari- Coker (Misty Knight), and the husband and wife directing team (Salim and Mara Brock Alil) of Black Lightning, have not forgotten to give Black women strong, positive roles in their new venture, something which White directors (especially White female directors)  always seem to forget, or only remember as an afterthought. Black content creators are doing the Lord’s work and I thank them for it. Plenty of little Black girls, including my niece, will grow up watching versions of themselves saving the world. And my Mom can finally get to see those Black female superheroes she didn’t know she needed.

This is one of my favorite scenes where Jefferson’s daughters surprise their father by joining him on his morning run.

As for the more questionable stuff: If you’re having anxiety issues surrounding police brutality, or implications of rape, then use caution while watching this show. There are a lot of guns (mostly used by gang members),  but you don’t really see many people get shot, until the end of the show, (and those are all villains). There is a mildly graphic scene where a man gets eaten by piranha. Don’t ask!

I have to admit to feeling a good deal of tension surrounding the opening scene, when Jefferson gets pulled over by  cops for driving while Black, and he and  his daughters are threatened. It’s a very harrowing scene, even when you remember that none of these characters are going to die ,or there’d be no show. This doesn’t seem to be one of those shows where “anybody can die”, but only the marginalized characters ever seem to get killed, so you guys are safe on that front.

There are three primary villains in the show. One of them is a low status employee of the local drug dealer who stalks Jennifer after she goes out to a club with him. One of them is an associate of Jefferson named La La, played by William Catlett,  and the other is Tobias Whale played by the albino actor, Marvin Krondon Jones III. Although ,once again, we really need to examine this thing where people with albinism are cast as villains all the time. I’m pretty sure that such individuals don’t like seeing themselves as the bad guys all the time in popular media.

The show tackles several topics. like the generation gap in activism, gangs, gun control in schools, and it also presents interesting ideas of how Black men handle oppression. There’s Jefferson’s manner, which is to try to lift up as many people as possible. There’s La La’s way of handling it, which seems to be just giving in, and the Kingpin-like Tobias Whale approach, which is to take advantage of the system to get ahead, and  attempt respectability.

After Jennifer and Anissa are kidnapped,  Black Lightning has to come out of retirement to rescue them. It seems the stress of being kidnapped, and nearly killed has unleashed Anissa’s abilities, so while we come into Black Lightning’s story in the middle, we will get to see the origins of Thunder and Lightning, and how they navigate the world with powers. We’ll also get to see how Jefferson deals with his children having abilities, and his daughter’s coming out,as a lesbian.

The show-runners have said that for the first season their focus is going to be on Black Lightning’s origins, and his beef with Tobias Whale. Most of his adventures will remain at the street/vigilante level, as with the first season of Daredevil ,and they’ll explore how Jennifer and Anissa deal with their new powers.

I also want to give a shout-out to the soundtrack director. Every form of  modern Black music gets represented , and I spent more than a little amount of my time not paying attention to the plot, as I sang along to some oldies, and even got introduced to a few new artists.

As with most pop culture  aimed at Black audiences, I’m mostly reading and signal boosting reviews from PoC , because I feel like these are the reviewers who can best understand  what they’ve just seen, and be able to speak to the authenticity of the show, as regards Black culture, although most reviewers, of all races, seemed to have enjoyed it.

Be here for further updates. I wont be doing a week by week review but I will keep abreast of events,  and come back to discuss some of the highlight episodes.

X-Men Joins the MCU!

With fans mounting rising questions about the fate of the Marvel Cinematic Universe after Disney’s acquisition of Fox, Disney CEO Bob Iger has confirmed that the X-Men, the Fantastic Four, and Deadpool will all be joining the MCU. According to Deadline, Iger told Disney investors: “We have the opportunity to expand iconic franchises for new […]

via Bob Iger Confirms X-Men, Deadpool, Fantastic Four for the MCU — WE ARE GEEKS OF COLOR

I’m cautiously excited about this, but only because it means Disney owns even more stuff. But the key word is that i am excited If we pressure them really hard, maybe we can get a Black Panther 2, (and eventually a Storm solo movie.)

I don’t like what Fox did with the X-Men, and I especially didn’t like the way Storm was treated, and I hope that Disney (the MCU) will show her the respect she deserves (with the proper actress).

To that end, my fancast of the next X-Men movie is based on the characters from the first one:

 

KRISTOFER HIVJU as Wolverine

I love this character from Game of Thrones, and he just seems very Wolvie to me. Yes, I can see him with muttonchops,  Black hair, and giant claws. He’d also be a great sub for Sabretooth.

 

RUTINA WESLEY as Storm

Everytime I see fancasts of Storm, she’s always cast as the lightest skinned Black actresses they can google Well,No, No, and again with the No! I want an actress with gorgeous dark skin, to play the goddess, and I would love to have a Black female director to do the solo movie, if at all possible, although I will settle for any director that knows and respects this character. (We need more female directors anyway because Ava Duvernay can’t be everywhere.)

Lupita Nyongo seems like a really popular fancast for this character, too, possibly because she’s the only Black actress most comic book fans seem to know the name of. Angela Basset would be great but she’s already starring in Black Panther as his mother, Raimonda.

Rutina impressed me with her toughness, and fierce intelligence, in the show True Blood, and she was steely, yet  vulnerable in Hannibal, and Queen Sugar. (She also kinda looks like one of my little sisters, so I’m biased.)

 

 

LANCE REDDICK as Professor Xavier

I just love this guy’s face, and I wanted to choose someone firmly outside of the box for this character. Plus, Lance just looks as if he might be reading your mind, right now.

 

 

GINA RODRIGUEZ as Rogue

I like Gina for America Chavez too, but I’d love to see her play Rogue, who is supposed to be young and tough, and traumatized. I think Gina could do that.

 

 

SOFIA BOUTELLA as Mystique

It’s just boring to me that people always pick the same 25 White actresses for a role where they’ll be covered in makeup the entire time. Besides, Sofia is gorgeous, and the makeup would only enhance her looks.

 

 

EVA MENDEZ as Jean Grey

In the comic books, Storm and Jean have been friends for decades, and I want to see that onscreen. I want to see the X-Women interacting with one another, getting along, and supporting each other, something that has never been shown in the movies, as those have always seemed to focus on the “important” activities of the men.

I like Eva’s sassy sense of humor, which would also make her perfect for Mystique.

 

TIMOTHY DALTON as Magneto

I was impressed by his gravity in Penny Dreadful, and I think he could pull it off. (or they could actually pick a Jewish actor, like Sacha Baron Cohen, or Daniel Day Lewis, two names not usually associated with superhero movies, so I’d be there for it.

 

TRIPLE H as Sabretooth

Yeah, he just seems sort of Sabretoothy to me.

MATT BOMER as Cyclops

Cyclops has to be really handsome, and yet kinda dull. In the comic books, he’s like a really po’ man’s version of Steve Rogers.

 

TROY SIVAN as Iceman

Troy Sivan would be perfect for Iceman, and is actually as gay as the character he’d be portraying. He starred as the young James Howlett, in the Wolverine movie, and has a popular Youtube channel.

 

Or if we really want to think outside, then Ryan Potter would look great as Iceman (He’s already been cast as Beastboy in the Titans tv series, though.)

Let me know what you think in the comments.

Unbreakable, Sleight, Spiderman, Chronicle: Shout Out to the Lowkey Superhero

 

In 1981, I watched the pilot for a show, starring William Katt (from  the 1976 movie, Carrie). In it, a Special Education teacher receives a Supersuit from some aliens and decides he wants to fight crime, even though he hates wearing the suit, and has lost the instruction manual. (Why won’t someone remake this show?) Aided by Special FBI Agent Bill Maxwell, played by Robert Culp, he spends most of his time trying to figure out what his superpowers are, and how to use them, with comical results.

In 1976, Carrie White discovers she had the power to move objects with her mind. Bullied and humiliated at her high school, she unleashes all of her rage on her classmates at the Senior Prom.

In 2000, Bruce Willis portrays David Dunn, a man who discovers that his body is essentially unbreakable, (just like Luke Cage), and has to figure out who and what he is, and what he wants to do with this power, aided by Samuel L Jackson, who also plays the movie’s  archvillain, Mr. Glass.

In 2012’s  Chronicle, Dane DeHaan plays Andrew Detmar who, along with his cousin Matt, and his friend Steve,  stumble across a strange rock in a cave, and receive the power to move objects with their thoughts. After bearing the brunt of schoolyard bullying, physical and emotional abuse from his father, and the death of his mother, Andrew nearly kills his father, and destroys a good portion of Seattle, before being killed by Matt.

In 2017’s Sleight, a young Black genius named Bo, creates the the ability to move metallic objects with his mind, while he clashes with the local drug dealer, Angelo.

In Spiderman Homecoming, Peter Parker is a newbie Super, dealing with such mundane things as schoolwork, bicycle thieves, and helping out the local Churro  Lady. He longs to save the world, while using nothing more than some superstrength, a fast wit, and some silkwebbing. He doesn’t have the social cache of Captain America, nor does he have Batman’s budget.

Jessica Jones, Daredevil, Luke Cage, Iron Fist. They’ve got one major power each, the ability to punch things really hard, lift a car, skin that won’t break, and the ability to see sounds. These are not gods. They can’t destroy a city block with the touch of a finger. They don’t own supersuits. They can’t even fly.  Even all-together they ain’t ever gonna be on the level of the Justice League.

http://www.denofgeek.com/movies/superhero-movies/39560/real-life-superhero-movies-a-closer-look

None of these characters are villains, but many of them are too beset by the weaknesses of their character, or the challenges of their environment, to ever do the world any  real good. They live in the real world of car payments, drug dealers, homework, high school bullies, and 9 to 5 jobs they don’t like, dealing with people who seriously test their ability not to abuse whatever powers they possess, and sometimes that can’t even avoid doing that.

They’re not goddesses created by Zeus. They’re not millionaires who never have to worry about paying for anything. They’re not exiled  aliens. These are not the types of heroes you call to go into outer space to destroy the intergalactic menace. They’re just trying to survive their tiny part of the universe.

And sometimes they don’t manage to do that either.

 

In Chronicle, Andrew wants to be special and important to the rest of the world, but that’s not gonna happen. Andrew could have been a true benefit to the world,  but he is bullied at school, abused by his father at home, his mother is dying, and they’re running out of money to pay for her medicine.  Andrew uses his abilities to rob a local drug dealer for the money, but how are his powers going to save his mother? How are those powers going to stop making him the brunt of his father’s anger at his wife’s death? Or make him charming, witty, or popular at school?

Sadly, Andrew gets a brief taste of these things, fending off his father’s abuse in one scene, participating in a talent show where he can secretly show off his abilities (and getting the accolades that he not only feels he richly deserves, but desperately needs), and losing it all when one of his friends, Steve, (who shared the same abilities as he did), dies , possibly as a result of Andrew’s actions.

Eventually, Andrew loses everything, including his mother,  and then eventually his life, at the hands of his cousin, Matt,  (who also shared the same superpowers), as he spirals down into a vortex of shame, hatred, grief, and anger. His powers couldn’t save him from himself.

None of these superpowers help Matt save his best friend Steve, or solve his cousin’s extreme trauma, or even alleviate his own  emotional trauma, at having to take his cousin’s life, when Andrew goes on an anger fueled rampage. We witness how useless Matt’s abilities are, during his fight with his cousin, when he can’t talk him down, can’t convince him that he is loved, and can only mitigate the damage he causes, with his only option being to kill him.

This is the horrific outcome of actual superpowers in a real world setting that is full of horribly damaged people, and people happy to inflict pain on others for fun. This is something not shown in the Avengers, and Iron Man movies. The villains in those always have lofty goals, and self-serving excuses for why they’re bad. They hate the hero, or want to control the world, or both. Andrew, and his counterpart, Carrie, (whose narrative closely parallels this one), sometimes don’t know what they are, are sometimes just  in pain, and cause an incalculable amount of damage and death, all because they  weren’t loved enough.

This is the opposite story of Unbreakable, where David Dunn, a depressed stadium security guard, begins to realize his true potential, while mentored by a  man who thinks he knows who and what David is capable of. When he and his  wife, Audrey, were involved in a car crash, David used that as an excuse to quit football, because Audrey was opposed to the sport. He spent the next ten years of his life wondering what could have been, and the life they could have had.

Not realizing that he is an  Unbreakable man, he  is approached by  Elijah Price, who tells him that he is special, that he can regain the glory he knew as high school football star. By using his strength to save lives, David discovers a new sense of purpose. Taking on the name Savior, his activities regain the  respect of his son, the love of the wife, who was planning to divorce him, and lifts his spirits, as he realizes what kind of man he is. David wasn’t trying to save the world. He was just trying to save himself.

http://reallifesuperheroes.com/

In Sleight,  Bo has the ability to move metal, due to a magnetic device he’s implanted in his arm. He gets involved with the local drug dealer, while trying to make a better life for him and his little sister, after their mother dies. Bo isn’t the next Tony Stark, but he would’ve been, were it not for the circumstances of his birth.

Here’s what the director had to say about the stereotypical setting of the movie, which also tackles issues of race and class, which most superhero movies don’t mention:

<Making Bo a role model and a drug-dealer seems potentially controversial, but it also speaks to his lack of options as a teenager trying to support his sister, and living without a safety net. But you don’t foreground the social issues of his choices. You don’t make it political. Was it important to you to not spell anything out too much?

Obviously, it’s a trope that’s unfortunately very recognizable for black characters in movies, in having something to do with street-level drugs and committing crimes. Part of the goal in centering ourselves in that world was to find a different, empathetic way into a trope that’s maybe a little too familiar. By centering it on this kid who is brilliant and artistic and has a scholarship going for him, we’re showing that a fall into this world really could happen to anyone. If everything you hold dear slowly started unraveling and you had massive responsibility, and part of that responsibility is shielding someone you care about from even knowing that this is going on… There are certain sacrifices we make to take care of the people around us. We don’t just want to paint that familiar iconography. We wanted to find a different way into it, then [go] past it.

And if you read between the lines in Sleight, there’s enough evidence that we’re not fully falling into the trope, I would hope. Bo’s neighborhood is actually not bad. He’s not in a crime-infested, impoverished area. He’s trying to keep his sister in the environment she’s comfortable in. But also, what he does is a very different brand of drug-dealing, one less associated with the urban crime story. When you look at a show like High Maintenance — if we had another act to talk about Bo’s clientele, these are the kinds of stories we would see. Which hints why Bo would consider selling drugs in the first place. He’s savvy enough to not end up on the corner selling dope. And his boss, Angelo, at first glance, isn’t a gun-toting gang-banger. Bo is making an educated compromise, something he thinks he can keep at arm’s distance.>

 

Bo isn’t  heroic because he’s trying to save the entire world. Bo is a hero because he’s working against long odds to save just one small world, his little sister’s.

Contrast Spiderman Homecoming with The Avengers. The Avengers are so far removed from everyday life that they seem almost like myths to the working man. Nowhere is this contrast more obvious than in the movie Spiderman Homecoming, about the activities of a low-level superhero who wants to make it to the big time. Peter Parker comes from a world of school, homework, and junior proms. His mentor is a multi-billionaire, whose every minor decision can affect entire lives, as Tony Stark’s decision to take over the salvage operations in New York, creates The Vulture, the villain who eventually becomes one of Spiderman’s Rogue’s Gallery.

Spiderman’s inability to run with the Big Boys, like Thor and The Hulk,  is the subject of a  great deal of humor, as seen in Captain America: Civil War, but it can also result in great tragedy, as his lack of discipline nearly causes a massive loss of  life, when he accidentally breaks the Staten Island Ferry.

 

In The Incredibles, the superheroes of yesteryear get a taste of what the mundane life is like when superheroing is outlawed by a fed up public. Now all they have are their real jobs, house payments, and watching their weight.  Mr Incredible chafes at these restrictions, living vicariously through his son’s grade school exploits, secretly crime fighting behind his wife’s back, and yearning for the days when he could channel all his restless ingenuity into bringing down super criminals. Like Peter Parker, the mundane life just isn’t challenging enough for him, or his little boy, Dash, There’s also the not so lowkey message in the film that when everyone is considered special, its really just another version of mundanity.

I suppose this essay would not be complete without mentioning the  ultimate street level superhero, Kick Ass, who is the very definition of a superhero nobody. David is a superhero only because he believes it. He has no superpowers to speak of, no martial skills, not even a sharp tongue. Armed with nothing more than a green bodysuit, and some Escrima sticks, he takes out muggers and drug dealers on the streets of New York City, in the hopes of  impressing that one girl in school he has a crush on. He inadvertently falls into deeper water than he can handle, when he encounters a vigilante father/ daughter duo, who are fighting an organized crime family.

There have been a spate of these movies in the past ten years, (Super, Defendor, Special) about the the low level exploits of gifted, and non-gifted heroes, yearning for the  Big Time, something to give their life meaning, a way to work out their psychological trauma, or just wanting to be special and/or loved. For some of them, these are weaknesses of character that will never allow them to rise to the level of an Avenger, or an X-Man, and other s are so grounded, they will never  get to be heroic, no matter how much they want it.

Even the move Suicide Squad dabbles in these ideas, with characters like Captain Boomerang, and Slipknot, or a character with no superpowers at all, beyond a taste for chaos, and an ability to wield a baseball bat. The’yre little more than small-time villains who get called on to save the world.

On the other hand, it makes them more relatable, and sympathetic,than the Tony Starks, and Supermen, of the world. Watching them rise to new levels of superheroics, as when Spiderman has no one to save him but himself in Spiderman: Homecoming, or when Bo defeats the neighborhood villains to successfully raise his little sister, gives us the  confidence to survive, especially when we’re beset by our own physical, and mental issues. When they overcome, they are the best of ourselves. And when they fall to the depths of despair, like Andrew and Carrie, they are reflections of our worst, and can spur us to examine and conquer our own weaknesses.

The Defenders Season Review

 

Instead of reviewing every episode, one by one, like most other reviewers, I’ve decided to just review the entire season.  Rather than 13 episodes, the series has been reduced to eight, which I feel was a really good idea, as this helps the story move along a lot more swiftly, and with less filler, than in the individual shows.  Since the plot is moving faster, and interludes are shortened, it’s not possible to get too irritated by any particular plot point (The Villain), or character (Danny), because you just don’t have much time for it.

Overall, I enjoyed the series. I can definitely say that I like certain characters much better in a team setting, than I did in their individual stories, because a lot of their weaknesses of character aren’t on full display here, and when they are on display, there’s a reason for it. I especially enjoyed all the team action, even just sitting around and talking to each other, because these guys are  a lot of fun together. Their fighting styles and attitudes just mesh really well, and they have great chemistry with each other, which makes for some interesting, and cool fight scenes, and some funny and snarky dialogue.

I think the show played up the reluctant hero angle a bit too much. The characters are always having conversations about how they’re not heroes, and don’t want to be heroes, especially Luke and Jessica. Matt is trying to quit  the superhero game as if he were going cold turkey from some kind of -ism. Danny is the only one who wants to be a hero, and he’s not  remotely equipped to be one.

 

Luke Cage:

 

We get a slightly deeper understanding of Luke as a person, although there are no huge revelations, or anything. He still doesn’t want to be a hero, he’s still living in Harlem, still trying to figure out what he wants to do with his life, all of this is just as in his own show.  We see the opening moves of a friendship between him and Danny, and Luke and Claire finally go out for that coffee, before being awkwardly interrupted by Luke’s former one night, Misty.

All of the characters get a chance to interact, one on one, during the series, although there’s not a lot of forward momentum in their characters, or relationships. Just hints of things to come. We get hints of a reconciliation between him and Jessica. In the comic books, the two are married and have a baby, but I don’t know if these shows will move in that direction. I’m opposed to it because of Jessica having killed his wife, (and then lied to him about it), and Jessica is also  not in any kind of emotional shape to have a relationship with anyone. Also, she is, ethically speaking, the complete opposite of  Luke, and I just don’t see those two  styles of personality meshing well.

As I mentioned, the showrunner doesn’t do anything new with the character. Luke remains a deeply principled guy who, while okay with kicking ass, is opposed to killing. He is not afraid to call someone on their shit, the way he does to Danny.

I love that all the characters have their place and purpose  in the team, and how their differing fighting styles are showcased. Luke is like Superman. He’s invulnerable to most harm, and is often a shield for the others, when the guns come out. He’s not completely invulnerable though, as Danny is one of the few people that can knock him off his feet (well…Danny and unexpected trucks). Seriously, the man is like a tank. He’s even immune to fire.

The team needs Danny whenever they need a huge, loud distraction, as in the finale, when they needed to reach a safe place, but The Hand was being an obstruction. Danny is like a large explosive device, delivering concussive sound and force, and I like the way his powers are used here, although yeah, the glowing fist still looks kinda silly. Still, Luke and Danny are definitely the team’s two heavy hitters.

One of the most annoying parts of the show is the Rap music that appears whenever Luke shows up on screen. To the showrunner: Hey! Luke does not  need a soundtrack to announce his presence!

Matt is the resident Ninja, and while Danny isn’t too bad in that department, Danny has a different purpose. Matt is the kind of team member who can move in and out of a situation quickly and quietly, warn the team of any impending danger, (and get them out of trouble with the law,  if necessary, I guess.)

 

 

Matt Murdock:

 

Matt spends a lot of the first couple of episodes trying not to be heroic, or save people. I think we’re meant to believe that he gave it all up after losing Elektra, but since I wasn’t buying his relationship with her, I didn’t care. The two of them have no chemistry, and the emotional intensity of a pair of titmice, especially when it comes to passionate exchanges.

On the other hand, it was nice seeing him put his lawyer-ly shit down, it was nice to see Foggy and Karen again, and I’m glad the three of them made some effort towards reconciliation, especially after last season’s events, when Karen found out he was Daredevil. The two of them treat, and talk about Matt, as if he were a recovering junkie, so that’s kind of weird, made even weirder by scenes of Matt “staring” longingly at his Daredevil outfit, as if it were an ice cream sundae.

Actually, a lot of Charlie Cox’s acting is off in this series. There’s story movement, but his character remains pretty much the same. His fighting skills are awesome as ever, but Charlie looks like he’s phoning in  his performance. When I called him a Floor Lamp Ninja, I meant that he could pretty much be swapped out by any other martial arts actor, and this would not  greatly affect the plot.

I did enjoy the scene where he tails Jessica on the streets and she susses him out, and when they meet for the first time in their superhero guises. Matt steals that big gray scarf she wears everywhere, to wrap around his face, and Jessica rolls her eyes at him.

 

 

Jessica Jones:

This show went a long way towards making me like this character. As much as she hates people, Jessica really does work well in a team setting. She takes nothing seriously, which ends up making her the funniest person in the group. Her one on one interactions with Matt are especially funny, and she gives absolutely no fucks about who  Danny is, and is quick to say so, which I thought was hilarious.

A lot of the weakness of Jessica’s show is that its very White Feminist, and her mistreatment of PoC in the show really started, not just to grate on my nerves, but to make me actively dislike her, no matter how much I sympathized with her issues. I know and understand  that she is dealing with the severe trauma of what Killgrave did to her, but trauma is not an excuse for her abuse and mistreatment of characters of color.

I actually had a problem, not just with her,but with the show’s writers as well. Despite women’s trauma issues being  the center of  the story, they still managed to erase  WoC entirely, which is something White Feminism keeps doing, in stories that are supposed to be empowering to women. (The stories end up being empowering only  to White women.) But I still applaud the show for its messages and the general treatment of its (White) female characters. I see why some people liked it, but ultimately the show wasn’t for me.

That’s just the logical reasoning for why I disliked the show. The other reason is there was a lot of triggering shit in that show. I had to stop watching it, for my own self care, because I was not ready!

I liked Jessica in The Defenders, because the focus wasn’t on Jessica’s pain, so we got to see her reacting to other things. She’s still an unlikable, alcoholic, snarky mess, but that’s okay. Who says heroes have to be likable? Its especially interesting because unlikability is rare in female characters, and Jessica is thoroughly unapologetic about herself. At one point she very openly steals a can of beer, from a passed out homeless man on the subway, (because she’s had a long day,) right in front of Matt and Luke, who handle  the act with no more than raised eyebrows.

Jessica is definitely the team’s Tony Stark to Luke’s Steve Rogers. There’s much of the same personality dynamics present, except some of the motivation for  Jessica’s rather  loose ethics stem partially from her trauma at the hands of Killgrave.

 

Danny Rand:

Yeah, for someone who talked a lot of shit about the Iron Fist series, I think you guys will be pleasantly surprised that I didn’t actually dislike Danny Rand in this show. As I mentioned, the shorter running time for the series means that Danny’s scenes are kept to a minimum, so he doesn’t have as much time to be irritating. Not that he doesn’t give it a big try.

Finn Jones has also had the benefit of some practice on his fight choreography, and better directors and it shows. His fight scenes aren’t the trash fire that they were in Iron Fist, so he actually ends up looking competent. Plus, he just works better with a team of people, than he does on his own.

The team dynamics go a long way towards making Danny likable here, and really, in the next season of Iron Fist, the show runners really need to lean in to the ridiculousness of his story, rather than playing it straight, because yeah, Danny sounds like he’s insane. None of the other team members take his backstory seriously, rolling their eyes every time he mentions he’s the Immortal Iron Fist, an attitude I thought was incredibly funny. And then there’s the silliness of him walking around with a large dragon tattoo on his test. His powers aren’t funny, and the audience is never given to laugh at those, but his backstory is kinda nuts. Mr. I Punched a Dragon!

Another reason I like Danny here, is because the showrunner makes an effort to make his character understandable, in a way that he wasn’t in his own series. In his own series, his behavior is incredibly rage inducing, and frustrating, (and I can’t help but think that this change has at least a little to do with the showrunner being a man of color, who understands the issue in a way the last showrunner didn’t). But here, Danny’s behavior is in smaller doses, and he has more well developed characters reacting to his wtf*ery, so he’s  a lot easier to understand. Granted, if the character had been cast as Asian to begin with, we wouldn’t need all these careful repairs.

http://www.indiewire.com/2017/08/luke-cage-iron-fist-marvel-defenders-netflix-privilege-1201868048/

For example, at one point, he and Luke square off, with Luke confronting Danny about his privilege as a rich White man, who chooses to come into his part of town and beat up the impoverished Black people, rather than finding some other way to defeat The Hand’s purposes. The Hand is able to operate with impunity in such neighborhoods because all they have to do is offer money. Luke’s statement is a reminder to Danny that there’s a bunch of other things he could’ve done, as a wealthy White man to defeat the purposes of The Hand, besides beating up the citizens. But then you notice that Danny’s go-to, when dealing with The Hand, is only ever violence. He never tries to thwart them any other way, and thinks he can  simply punch his way to the proper outcome.

For example: Danny and Colleen find a warehouse full of bodies. The Hand is hiring young men from Luke’s  neighborhood to  clean up any evidence that might lead to their organization. Danny and Colleen do not know this. They don’t ask questions, have not investigated the situation, and haven’t bothered to understand the why of any of it. The two of them immediately jump to kicking ass. Danny and Luke first meet when  Luke steps in to protect one of the young men, who has lost his family to The Hand, and feels coerced to work for them.

Luke’s statement about his privilege is meant to remind Danny that there are other perspectives  besides his own. It’s made very plain  that when it comes to The Hand, Danny has a huge blind spot.  Danny doesn’t  think, he just reacts, and that was what happened at the warehouse, which  resulted in Danny brutally beating a (Black) teenage boy. He’s  reckless, impulsive, and has anger issues. He and Colleen don’t have any kind of a plan, beyond destroying The Hand. This gets mentioned a couple of times during the show.

https://www.theverge.com/2017/8/18/16118680/the-defenders-netflix-marvel-iron-fist-sucks

On to the good part: Danny doesn’t get any better at being impulsive, but he does listen to what gets said to him. And the showrunner is a lot better at making clear what Danny’s motivations are, something which is cloudier on his own show. Danny is looking for a purpose. Since he abdicated his responsibilities to K’un L’un (Why?), he’s not only been looking for a way to atone for that, but looking for a new purpose to replace it, and probably looking for a new family too, as he’s one of the few characters that’s at all excited about teaming up. But again he is blind to his rage about The Hand, and as long as he remains blind to his lack of control, as regards them, he can accomplish nothing.

When the rest of the team find out the the The Hand is specifically after Danny, they try to get him to stand down, and stay out of their next fight, rather than just running up on ’em, without a plan. I’m always here for Danny getting his ass handed to him, which the team has to resort to, to keep Danny from fucking up, yet again. There follows a long interlude with him and Luke getting to know each other, and Danny trying to at least understand Luke’s perspective on the world.

So yeah, this show went a little way to making me, if not like Danny, at least understand where he’s coming from in terms I could easily grok.

 

Alexandria:

 

Sigourney Weaver turns in a beautiful performance, as I expected, before being unexpectedly dispatched near the end of the series. My biggest problem is that her motivations as a villain are so vague and ill-defined I was completely unable to care what her goals were. We know what she and the other members of The Hand want to do, but we have no idea why they want to take over the world, other than just wanting to do it.

I didn’t focus on her unfathomable motivations. I just tried to focus on her performance.  She and Elektra have great chemistry, reminiscent of Ellen Ripley and Call, the Android from Alien Resurrection, and I found this dynamic fascinating. On a lighter note, I loved her outfits. Alexandra is always impeccably dressed. She just looks like a woman with a lot of money and extravagant but unshowy tastes.

Another problem that I have is that the women in this show rarely get to interact with each other, (although Claire and Colleen get some nice scenes together, and later, Colleen and Misty get to talk). Alexandra spends a lot of time alone. They couldn’t even bother to write her as being friends to Madame Gao, having her treat Gao like a servant, which I found especially distasteful. Here you have a wealthy White woman treating this older Asian woman as if she were the Help, although there are other factors behind why she does it, it was still ugly and racist, even if that was not what was intended.

I still don’t know why the  showrunners bothered to call Sigourney into this show, which she is simply too good for. I had noticed that her presence sidelines the Asian characters putting, them all in a subordinate position to her, and significantly reducing Madame Gao’s street cred, that she’s built over three other shows. As much as I like Sigourney, I feel like the story would have been better served without Alexandra.

 

Elektra:

 

I still do not like this character, because I just feel like she’s evil for no  feckin’ reason. I didn’t like her in Daredevil either, because the writers just made her seem batshit insane for no reason. Elodie Young is gorgeous and all, and can actually act, as I’ve seen her elsewhere acting just fine, but I don’t like the way she approached this character. When we first see her here, she has been brainwashed and controlled by The Hand, most especially Alexandra. She’s pretty much a perfect example of the Born Sexy Yesterday Trope.  Later,  she appears to become evil on purpose,and for the life of me, I simply could not care.

http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/discussion.php?id=dxgnmgk8728039vcnyat5g65

After Elektra’s resurrection, she is mentored in her evil-ness by Alexandra, and it was really interesting watching the relationship between the two of them, but she does eventually betray Alexandra, and turns against The Hand. Once again, for no reason that I could discern than that the writers needed a new villain in the plot.

The show is somewhat formulaic, with the idea of replacing one Big Bad with another, halfway through the season. This happened with Iron Fist, Daredevil, and Luke Cage, where the viewer starts out with one villain, who gets unceremoniously dispatched by the true villain of the story. Basically, a villain bait and  switch.

I wanted to like Elektra. I just don’t. I couldn’t understand her motivations for anything, and I wasn’t feeling her deep love affair with Matt Murdock. Which is not helped by Matt Murdock acting like  “Floor Lamp Ninja”, throughout most of the series. When she’s not smurking evil-ly, she has a blank, wide-eyed, look on her face, which I found kinda irritating. I got no problem with Elektra’s martial skills. Those were exemplary, as always.

 

Colleen Wing:

 

She has even less personality growth here then in Iron Fist. In fact, I found her much more annoying in The Defenders, than I did in that show. She didn’t make much of an impression on me for this show, either. Part of this has to do with the shorter length of the series. There’s just not enough time to develop all the characters, so some of them get short shrift and hers is especially short.

The only thing we get from Colleen’s is more of her being Danny’s support network, (as she is told by Claire) and fighting the same endless fight against Bakuto, that she fought in Iron Fist, with Bakuto making the exact same talking points. Why he wants her is anybody’s guess Is he in love? Wants her as a protege? We don’t know or understand. His motivations are pretty vague. As are most The The Hand’s motivations.

Collen’s motivations are even less discernible to us than they were in Iron Fist. That was a problem that wasn’t even approached here. We don’t know why she loves him, and the two are not especially demonstrative, but nevertheless we are led to believe they are a couple. She may be Danny’s emotional support but she’s doing an awful job at helping him deal with his anger issues ,or his ideas about who and what he is. Case in point, it took a near total stranger, Luke , to point out one of Danny’s biggest flaws. The problem may be that Colleen is unable to point out Danny’s flaws because she’s too much like him. She has a go along to get along attitude with Danny that I found irritating, never questioning what he says or does, and mindlessly following him in his quest. She has no story of her own, seemingly having gave it up to be little more than Danny’s helpmate. The writers need to do better with her. Hopefully, if there is a spinoff show with Misty, she’ll be better written.

As per usual there’s nothing wrong with Colleen’s martial skills. In fact the choreography isn’t bad for the whole series, and at least a few of the directors know how to shoot fight scenes well enough to make them all different, and compelling enough, to keep watching. My favorite fight scenes are the team fights though.

 

Misty Knight:

 

There’s not much character growth with Misty Knight either, but at least her motivations are clear. We know exactly what she wants in the narrative and why she wants it. She wants to solve her case, and get a promotion, (or not be fired), which is hindered by the fact that the people who could help her solve it, refuse to tell her anything, and the fact that, with The Hand, she is totally out of her league.

Misty is a cop, so she has mostly cop concerns, just as she did in Luke Cage. Shit is happening, her friends are in the middle of it, and they won’t tell her anything, because they realize, but refuse to explain clearly to her, just how far out of her depth she is. I kept admonishing Luke (and Jessica) to make clear to her, that the organization they’re  dealing with  doesn’t give a flying hot damn if she’s a cop, and will happily kill her (and her entire fam), but they kept refusing to tell her this, which was becoming really frustrating.

I’ve also seen some shitty meta about how she’s a bad character because she keeps attacking people she needs help from, and I’m like Bish please! She’s not attacking your White faves! She is being a cop, who knows that the information that will allow her to do her job, is being withheld. She’s got one job in the damn show, which is solving her case, and  she can’t do it, because  the four people who know something about it, won’t tell her anything. So yeah, she gonna be irritated, and not afraid to show that irritation.  This is called DRAMA, people!( I’m trying to  remember that I’m dealing with the hysterical children of Tumblr, who think any time  characters of color show irritation at a White character’s actions,  that it automatically makes them a villain. Yep! This is the level of logic I’m dealing with on Tumblr, guys!)

But she comes through in the end anyway, and lets the team handle their bidness. Although, I suspect she’s mostly there because Luke and Claire were in danger. (Remember, Misty doesn’t know who  any of those White people are. They are just mysterious somebodies who are obstructing her job. Luke and Claire are the ones who are her friends..)

Misty is known in the comic books for having a silver bionic arm, and for teaming up with Colleen to be the Daughters of the Dragon. (On an alternate Earth, she even gets to carry Steve Rogers shield, sorta like a female Bucky.) So,  we may get to see her new prosthetic in season two of Luke Cage, and if we’re lucky we’ll get to see her and Colleen team up. Hey! If side characters like the Punisher can get their own show, they can make a Daughters of the Dragon series, (possibly in the style of the Foxy Brown Blaxploitation movies of my youth.) The series should of course be helmed by a Black or Asian woman, because I absolutely do not  trust a White, male, showrunner to get a Black woman, and an Asian woman correct.

http://mashable.com/2017/08/18/the-defenders-misty-knight-arm-daughters-of-the-dragon-spinoff/#KKkkf8UKpmqx

 

The Hand:

https://www.bustle.com/p/who-are-the-five-fingers-of-the-hand-the-defenders-reveals-whos-pulling-the-strings-77358

Unfortunately, the shorter the running time of the series does not seem to allow much clarity on who, or what, The Hand is, or why they want what they want. We have some idea of what they’re doing globally, not just in New York, but that’s pretty much all we get.

New York starts experiencing a spate of seismic disturbances, which are being caused by The Hand digging near some sort of fault line, under a plot of land they built an office on. Why they are digging is slightly unclear. I think some dragon bones are involved becasue its briefly mentioned tat this has something to do with how Iron Fist got his power. For some reason ,they also need to capture Iron Fist and beat him up, or make him angry so he can open some kind of doorway to K’un L’un, so the five leaders of The Hand can go back home.

I did pay attention but really that’s the best I can do regarding the rather lackluster plot. I really didn’t care, although i guess its supposed to be some sort of revelation ,that the five leaders are all incredibly old, exiled citizens of K’un L’un. Even the facts of why they’re exiled in the first place isn’t made abundantly clear. I really hope the showrunner and the writers were making some kind of point about cloudy motivations, or something becasue the villains are a mess.

Alexandra gets unceremoniously dispatched and replaced by Elektra, who gives a self important speech about how she’s now the leader of The Hand. I don’t know if its the actress, or the writing, but I was bored by the whole thing. Why we were introduced to new memebers of The Hand only to have them killed right away is anyone’s guess.

Since The Hand is an egalitarian organization there’s a Japanese guy, whose name I don’t remember, a Brazilian guy named Bakuto, an African (Haitian?) guy named Sowande, and Ms. Gao, who I assume is Chinese. Sowande reminds me of the lead character from the movie Beasts of the Southern Wilds who was a procurer of child soldiers. Sowande is brutally tortured and killed by he Defenders after they capture him in an attempt to find out his people’s plans, something which did not sit well with me. And before you come into my inbox and start mansplaining about how the other members of The Hand also get killed, I have to remind you, that none of the other members of The Hand were brutally tortured first. This happens to the sole Black member of The Hand, by people who are, supposedly, the good guys.

Couple that scene with Iron Fist’s brutal beating of a young Black boy in an earlier episode,Jessica jones treatment of its Black male characters,  Daredevil’s treatment of its Asian characters as some type of Yellow Peril (which even the presence of a White woman leader cannot resolve), and Iron Fists White Savior issues, and it becomes clear that the the MCU has some serious racial issues that need addressing. The only disability on display is Matt Murdock’s blindness. Jessica Jones treament of one of its lesbian characters was, quite simply, abominable, and outside of that there is no LGBT representation in any of it. Marvel comic books are doing much better in regards to these issues than the MCU.

One of the ways they can address some of these issues is by hiring different types of showrunners, and writers and treating the creation of these shows (and the movies which have all the same problems) the same way they approach the comic books. The newest phase of MCU movies have gotten a little bit better as far as racial issues (but not by much) and it’s seriously lacking in LGBT and disability representation, and the creators of these projects need to think more deeply about these issues, most especially in its treatment of Asian characters across all of the MCU, as it’s becoming creepily apparent that maybe don’t like people of the Asian diaspora.

Despite all my criticisms though, I actually enjoyed watching it. I’m still glad I didn’t have to spend 13 hours watching it, instead of the eight. The strongest part of the series are the scenes of The Defenders working together as a team. There’s a lot of room for improvement but also a lot of promise for a season two.

Spiderman Homecoming

 

 

Just in case you hadn’t guessed, there are going to be lots of spoilers. I’m basically gonna be talking about the plot, in detail. So if you haven’t seen this movie, its time to check out of this post, right now.

I’ll wait for you to come back!

 

 

So yeah! I went to see Spiderman Homecoming this weekend, along with about a million other people, because Spiderman totally blew the fuck up this weekend. There are some movies that I get a good feel for their success, and others not so much, but this one I felt good about.  This is an instinct  that’s based entirely on my own own enthusiasm for a movie, so it’s not some infallible thing, where I’m always right.

And yeah, the movie is every bit as entertaining as everyone says it is. I took The Potato with me, and she seemed to really enjoy herself. It isn’t a very deep movie, but I wasn’t expecting depth from a Spiderman movie, so that’s okay. I don’t require every movie be an intellectual exercise, (just Christopher Nolan’s.) Sometimes you just want a movie to be a lot of fun, or bring the feels, and Spiderman does both of those. I found myself more interested in the relationships and dialogue, than the action scenes, although those were good too. I’m also glad to see that they didn’t do an origin story. We’ve had a bunch of those already.

I don’t normally see movies with teenagers in them, as most of the time they aren’t written very realistically as teens, and they always look like people with mortgages. I’ll tolerate a high school setting for the sake of a good story, but I generally don’t seek out material with that setting, on purpose.That said, I really enjoyed this because these are some of the most realistically written teens I’ve seen in a movie. I especially enjoyed these kid’s relationships with their parents, and the parents relationships to their kids, which is often written as being fraught with emotional drama, with sullen and unlikable teens. I even liked most of the kids. I liked that they looked, dressed, and acted like kids, instead of runway models, or future serial killers.

Most of the drama remains between Peter and  Michael Keaton, as The Vulture, or Peter messing up a situation that was already under control, because he wants so badly to be a superhero. Tony tells him he’s not ready for the big leagues, even though he was the one who picked Peter to go fight Captain America, in Civil War. So Peter gets a taste of the big time, and because he doesn’t believe Tony believes in him, ends up proving Tony’s point, that he’s not ready. When he almost gets all the people on the Staten Island Ferry killed through his interference, Tony takes away the suit he gave him at the end of Civil War, and  Peter spends the rest of the movie trying to prove he’s worthy. There’s a not insignificant portion of the movie spent with Peter trying to figure out how to work the suit. His origin story is glossed over in a few lines. We don’t even get a flashback, for which I remain grateful.

The Vulture is not one of my favorite villains from the comic books. (That would be Dr. Octopus) but I liked him okay, mostly due to Keaton’s ability to sell being warm and friendly, while also being  pantshittingly scary. There’s a scene, just before the Homecoming Dance, when he figures out that Peter is Spiderman, and confronts Peter about his secret identity, that scared the bejeebus out of me. You expect the typical events to occur, where he threatens Pete’s friends and family, or holds Aunt May hostage during the Homecoming Dance, and then Peter spends the rest of the movie trying to rescue somebody. Thankfully the writers skip over all that, and the fight remains between The Vulture and Spiderman to the end.

This  is indeed one of the most diverse MCU movies, I’ve ever seen, though I’m still mad about Miles Morales not being Spiderman. It’s like the MCU is punking us, or something. But there’s hope for a future teamup between the two Spider-men, because Miles’ uncle gets a funny cameo and mentions his nephew. The central characters are still white guys, but the PoC are not ill treated,  and get lots of screen time. None of them are developed characters, because it’s a pretty huge cast, and the movie is already two and a half hours, and the focus is all on Peter’s character. Peter’s teen crush, Liz, gets almost no character beyond being pleasant and pretty, for example. She is bi-racial, and I think it’s intriguing that   this movie shows two white men being  romantically interested in Black women. Peter’s best friend is Ned, who gets a little bit more character work, and is played by Jacob Batalon. He was a lot of fun and gets almost as much screen time as Tom Holland.

There are a number of characters I really enjoyed and I’m going to go through this by the  character names:

Aunt May – Marisa Tomei

I really liked Marisa Tomei’s version of Aunt May, who is supportive and funny. I still have no idea what she does for a living but she is apparently well known in the neighborhood as a hottie. It’s referred to a couple of times but not to the level where it becomes creepy. Also, she’s not prone to the speechifying of the Aunt May from the first  Spiderman movies with Tobey McGuire. I sometimes got tired of hearing her talk, even if what she said was supposed to be inspiring.

At no point, in this narrative, do they  damsel Aunt May, for which I am eternally grateful. At one point Peter,who has been invited to the Homecoming Dance by the girl of his dreams, Liz, enlists Aunt May’s help in getting him ready. She gets him a suit, teaches him to tie his tie,  and even teaches him how to boogie. That poor boy can’t dance a lick, though. aunt May can at least keep a beat.

 

Ned – Jacob Batalon

Ned gets almost as much screen time, as he’s Peter’s best friend, and is the first person to find out he’s Spiderman. Jacob is just as charming as Tom Holland and I totally fell in love with his cute, little nerdy self, with his Legos, and his big mouth, although my niece wasn’t too impressed with him, though. He manages to get Peter into trouble with his peers,  because he’s so excited that he’s friends with Spiderman. Earlier in the movie, he asks Peter if he can be Spiderman’s “Man in the Chair”, who gives the hero instructions while in the field, and during the Homecoming scene, he, very happily, gets  his big chance.

Jennifer Connolly is the voice of Karen, The Spidey Suit

She talks to Peter through his Spiderman suit, and even she gets a couple of great lines. The suit’s voice is something that was added just for the film. In most of the comic books, Peter’s suit isn’t made by Tony Stark and doesn’t talk much. (There is an alternate version of Spiderman, in a gold and red suit, that was created by Stark, but he’s not Spiderman Prime, as it were.)

 Adrian Toomes – Michael Keaton

Keaton plays the movie’s least funny character. But he’s also a sympathetic character, having lost his salvage and demolition business to Stark’s politicking. In the aftermath of The Avengers movie, there’s a lot of cleaning up to do, and Toomes set himself, and his crew, to be a salvage team. Unfortunately, a lot of the salvage is alien technology, that really shouldn’t be in the hands of civilians, and during the course of the movie you can see why, as the civilians use this technology to act a fool, lose control of the technology, and occasionally even lose track of it.

Adrian is also Liz’ Dad, which Peter doesn’t find out until half the movie is over, and he’s already asked her to the Homecoming. All three are sitting in the car, on the way to the dance, when it slowly begins to dawn on Adrian that Peter is Spiderman. Talk about tense and Awkward!!!

Toomes is married to Garcelle Beauvais, and he’s a great father, he loves his family, and is dedicated to taking care of them. His argument that he is only making money by selling weapons, the same way Tony’s family made theirs, is justifiable, and I didn’t have a problem with his reasoning, up to a point. My problem is that he and his garage buddies are stealing the technology,  and they aren’t qualified to handle alien tech. At one point he accidentally kills one of his people (Shocker #1) because he grabs the wrong weapon. Can you imagine your dumb-assed  neighbor cobbling together some alien tech in his garage? I think not!

 

Shocker #2 – Bokeem Woodbine

When Shocker #1 gets killed, Bokeem’s character inherits his weapon. I really like this actor, and I’m semi-interested in seeing him become one of Peter’s Rogues Gallery, which is what they call Spiderman’s regular coterie of bad guys, in the comic books. Most of Spiderman’s villains, who insist on jumping in and out of prison, have animal names, but the Shocker is something of a change from Dr. Octopus, The Scorpion, The Vulture, Chameleon, Black Cat, The Goblin, Rhino. That said, I would love it if Kraven the Hunter showed up in one of Spidey’s movies, or the life-eating Morlun, who is a kind of ageless, spiritual vampire. But so far, all we got is  Shocker.

Coach Wilson – Hannibal Buress

Hannibal Buress gets a funny turn as Peter’s gym coach, who is also the head of detention. What few scenes he gets are hilarious like when he’s required to show Captain America’s stupid PSAs in his class, while he briefly wonders; isn’t the Captain a Federal criminal, now?

 

Michelle – MJ – Zendaya

I’m surprised to say that this is one of my favorite characters in the entire movie and I wasn’t expecting that. She is funny as hell, and although she’s not in a lot of scenes, she steals almost every one of them, due mostly to Zendaya’s comedic timing and delivery. The Potato loves her Disney show, KC Undercover, and was delighted to see her.

She’s just a  funny weirdo in the movie and I loved her. She shows up to detention, and when Coach Wilson asks why she’s there because she doesn’t even  have detention, she says she likes to come there because she likes drawing people in crisis. She then shows him a picture she drew of him. That just tickles the hell outta me, and makes me wish I had thought of doing that when I was in art school. Later, when Peter is looking depressed in class, she flips over her paper to show him  the drawing she did of him. I think this tickled the rest of the audience.

Oh ,and it actually turns out that the filmmakers lied about Zendaya being Mary Jane. She’s basically a future Mary Jane with a new name, Michelle. I guess they did that to throw off the scent of the idiot fan-guys who protested making Mary Jane a Black girl. Yes, her hair is annoying for the entire movie.

She claims to be unaffected by her high school life but you get the impression she really does have a low-key crush on Peter. She pays a lot of attention to him, even though she claims she doesn’t care,  telling the class she doesn’t have a crush on him, and is just highly observant. What a strange girl.

Flash Thompson is played by Tony Revolori, and he’s every bit as annoying as you’d expect a bully to be, but is also deeply funny, often referring to Peter as Penis Parker, and gleefully wondering when Peter will be expelled. You get the impression that he’s not bullying Peter because he has some deep dark secret in his home life, because its not really that kind of bullying. This version of Flash isn’t a jock, because its not that type of school, so his teasing of Peter is mostly due to academic rivalry, more than anything else.

Compared to the comic books this is the one most like the 90s comic books, and the Mark Millar version. This is one of the funniest Spiderman movies, too. The MCU understands this character the best, and how they’d like to depict him, and it shows. The original movie, starring Tobey MacGuire, had its moments, and I particularly enjoyed the second movie with Dr. Octopus, but Peter wasn’t funny in any of them. He was hapless, and a loser, but he didn’t make me laugh, even if the supporting cast was hugely funny. This Peter is a loser, but not in a depressing sort of way, like the Raimi version. The movie manages to remain lighthearted, even when Peter is being put into embarrassing ethical positions by his friends. This version of Peter is hapless because of his intensity, not because life seems to have it in for him.

The second iteration of Spiderman, with Andrew Garfield, brought a lot of feels, and I really liked those movies but, once again, they were not very funny, although funnier than McGuire’s version. The humor level drops  a notch  when this Peter  is in costume, but that’s okay, because its hard to  drop quips, when you’re getting your ass kicked. I’m glad the humor isn’t limited to the rest of the cast, though, and that Peter  remembers to be funny when he’s in costume.

But the most charming moments  occur at the beginning of the movie, when we pick up the story, with Tony recruiting him to go fight the other Avengers in Civil War. Normally, I don’t pay a whole lot of attention to large battle scenes in movies, but that scene in Civil War is, hands down,  one of the funniest fights I’ve ever seen in an American action movie.  Peter’s narration of it just gives it a new dimension of silliness. Peter is such a goofy mess, a hyperactive 10 year-old, as he personally films the event, which he’s not supposed to be doing. Incidentally, Tony’s presence in this movie goes a long way towards making up for recruiting a 14 year-old boy into his Avengers war, but yeah, I’m still mad at Tony for lying to Peter about why. Just add that to the list of things that make you wish Tony would catch these hands.

Oh, and you should stick around long enough to get trolled by, of all people, Captain America, who made me roll my eyes twice while he lectured the audience on the virtues of patience. That’s totally NOT funny guys!😜

So yeah, I really, really liked this movie. It’s better than The Amazing Spiderman 2, and that Raimi production, Spiderman #3, even though I’m one of the five people who seemingly  liked that one. On the other hand it’s just not as good as the Tobey McGuire’s Spiderman 2, because that one starred Otto Octavius and it’s hard to top a good villain. The creators do need to stop making Spiderman films for a little while, though. I don’t want to see any more Spiderman movies until he’s in college. If you haven’t seen Spiderman Homecoming yet, I’d definitely recommend it.

The next movie I’d like to see is Valerian and the City of a Thousand Planets. I may not get the chance to see that, however, for budgetary reasons, but Me, Mom, and The Potato, will definitely be sitting in the theater for The Dark Tower on August 4th.