Iām probably going to forgive a bunch of bullshit just for the necronomicon and the candarvian dagger showing up an Easter egg. I guess thatās the marvel movie way right?
being a cinephile now is all about ārevealsā āeaster eggsā and āspoilersā
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the reason i still have so much patience for mcu stuff, even though the movies are just like openly bad, just occurred to me. i think it has a lot to do with the haphazard way i consumed comic books when i was a kid, along with my general preference for things that provide the illusion of depth rather than actually being complicated.
like, i never had the money or patience to actually follow any of the concurrent narratives that were going on in marvel comics in the 90s. but i really liked the characters? i just didnāt have the material or uh mental resources to actually keep track of a plot across a bunch of different issues. i feel like iāve brought this up here before and someone was just like āthey arenāt actually that complicated.ā fuck you buddy i was 12. and stupid as hell. iām still one of those things! so i really wanted to know what was going on with all those crazy characters, but i only ever experienced it in random disconnected bursts when i happened to remember to buy a comic book. or, i had this one friend whose classic birthday gift gimmick was just giving you a giant box of 25 cent comics, so you would get like a few dozen totally unrelated issues. it actually owned? smart kid.
anyway, even though i wanted to know all about spider-manās clones or whatever, the idea of actually reading enough comic comic books to get the whole story was totally overwhelming. i similarly find the idea of playing one of those actually deep and expansive CRPGs or dwarf fortress or whatever totally intimidating. i think iām kind of a completionist, but, an extremely lazy one, so i experience this overwhelming sense ofā¦ being overwhelmed(?) that turns me off whenever i feel like iāve turned a corner thatās led me into something too big to grasp all at once.
the weird thing is i am kind of drawn to that feeling. to me that sense of barely being able to make out the contours of some impossibly complex situation paired with brief moments of discovery and clarity are really the most euphoric parts of doing research. but when it comes to leisure activities i enjoy it more when that feeling is simulated. the fantasy of actually being able to master knowledge of something is i guess a kind of wish fulfillment that makes entertainment entertaining to me. itās why iād rather play zelda than morrowind. both have moments where they feel like an encyclopedia is about to get dumped on your head, but only one of them actually does it.
so with the marvel movies, they kind of give you these completely dumbed down versions of the sprawling interconnected plots of comic books, but the stuff is released at what is still (to me) a fairly manageable pace. thereās not like new issues of a bunch of different runs to read every month, itās just a few movies a year and i guess some shows now. it makes me feel like i can fill in all those gaps that were too off-putting back in the old days. but i guess i could also just read plot summaries on wikipedia (i do that a lot too).
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Yeah my opinion on marvelshit up thru Endgame was definitely ā5 hours worth of movies per year is a worthwhile price to pay to keep track of a whole crossover fictional universeā but that natural (and crappy) conclusion completely exhausted my interest in keeping up, especially when they started gilding the lily with all these extra movies and shows. And, like, I could only watch crap for so long. Eventually I had to deal with the fact that movies were bad and I couldnāt really watch them like vaguely amusing wikipedia articles any more.
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getting back into dc comics and am happy to report that itās been fun! read nightwing #88 and it was so cute and fun. gonna read catwoman and huntress today and try not to spend money too much on comics next month.
with dan didildo gone things seem to be back on track plot wise with everything and i no longer have to worry about everyone dying every two seconds ( especially grayson )
will report back once i get the full nightwing volume.
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this sounds awesome
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kudos. Iāve bounced off DC for now. I know they have another reset coming, which seem ridiculous because they just had one. I tried Nightwing and just didnāt care enough to keep picking it up. Curious what you think of catwoman and Huntress.
Iāve been very into Marvel lately.
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It was great - its budget friendly and still genuinely surprising and entertaining for a long time. probably one of the few birthday party gifts I still remember to this day. Highly recommended gimmick if youāre the parent of a kid who doesnāt know what to bring to a birthday party.
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this makes me wary considering how things have gone in the past but iāll probably stick around for it just to see. finally got some free time so iām gonna read huntress now ( i love her so much i hope itās good )
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apparently this is a tie in to detective comics. iām not crazy about the art and the story isnāt super interesting to me either. i donāt think iām gonna bother to keep up with this until they actually give helena her own run. started catwoman and am enjoying it a lot more. will finish tomorrow.
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For what Iāve been reading lately.
i watched the āthe eternalsā movie. it honestly was not as bad as i feared it would be, i would definitely place it above black widow and many of the more forgettable sequels. it still wasnāt good, per se, but i enjoyed that it was kind of like if terrence malick directed a power rangers movie.
the screenplay was overall bad, but i thought they did a fairly good job of wedging the premise into the existing plot labyrinth the MCU has become. they did a very bad job of making it seem like any of the characters were feeling the weight of any of that stuff though. like they were focusing more on avoiding plot holes than actually letting the characters react to any of those elements. the other recent movies/shows also have this problem, it just seems weird to write in a device where half the earthās population disappears for five years, and then returns inexplicably, only to have every movie after it just kind of reference this with one or two lines. falcom and the winter sorcerian at least tried to make its whole plot revolve around it, but the show otherwise sucked so itās not exactly praiseworthy.
anyway i think i felt it more in the eternals because the scope of the movie is much bigger. i also thought it was wild that the solution to the problem in the climax of the movie was for circe to just kill the celestial by turning it into a stone. as this was happening, i was convinced that what she was doing it was turning it into a solid block of ice that would thaw only when global warming caused the planet to become uninhabitable anyway, thus leaving humans to be the ones responsible for sealing their own fate anyway, while still preserving the life of the celestial and its future career as a world maker or whatever. in my mind this is such a perfect resolution to all the conflicts that come up between the characters in the movie, and i was just likeā¦ kind of dumbfounded when it turned out not to be the case. the one time iāve ever wished a movie was more predictableā¦
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Read the Soule run on DD had thoughts.
Onto the Zadarsky run on DD.
Watched The Butman. It felt like an episode of a Batman procedural show, which is kind of alright except the murder mystery is the same mystery weāve seen done over and over for decades. While the movieās first 15 minutes and last quarter touch on what could have been a decent thematic through line for the movie, it instead doesnāt really develop Batman or anyone else really strongly over the course of its run. Itās almost entirely the Dynamic Duo we all love, Batman and Jim Gordan, investigating crime scenes shoulder to shoulder. Which would be perfectly acceptable if we didnāt already know the story. Or the riddles were inventive in any way.
Itās also one of the situations where if your are okay with corrupt politicians getting knocked off in an action movie, then I donāt know that youāre really going to be too upset at the bad guy for most of the movie.
At least it felt tonally different from the other Batman movies and actually does commit to the ādetectiveā bit. It really is like a really long episode of Law and Order SVU mixed with a sprinkle of personal drama. Except Law & Order does a better job telling a story in an hour than The Batman does in 3 hours and doesnāt leer at itās one female character constantly.
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This looks worse than I would have imagined given the premise, which is impressive in a way.
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A lot of working backwards from the joke there.
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It was a good decision to remove this scene, but itās also a microcosm of the movieās writing.
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