i have to admit that today’s wanadvision was the funniest/goofiest possible way that the walt disney corporation could start bringing in characters from the fox x-men movies just as a fucking wacky sibling from out of town
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i am hoping her face was more like, “i don’t remember you as my brother,” as opposed to like, “oh it’s my dead brother”. i think it’d have been more clear if she didn’t walk into the hug but idk.
there’s something extraordinarily comic-book-y about the TV series that wasn’t there in the already comic-book-y movies. it’s got that “fuck we gotta keep this thing moving and <30 min and fuck fuck go go” feel that i think is cheap but also kinda love
even though it was fun to watch, all the 20th century sitcom stuff has been parodied better and more accurately elsewhere. but as a sitcom nerd, i am glad that the emblematic show of this ep was malcolm in the middle because it really hasn’t been done before and was ridiculously influential to that entire decade of television. kinda wish they’d done a more specifically 90s married with children/roseanne kind of thing, tho. kind of a bummer in the meta sense that modern family/the office is the next one. fun to see all the “canonical” costumes
truly cant believe robert and kristen lopez managed to make a song in wandavision as catchy as any of their catchiest stuff from frozen or avenue q or book of mormon or whatever. i mean it’s pastiche like everything but it’s somehow maybe their best disney villain song lol
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My dad went to a local comic convention a decade or so back (he likes looking for pre-code horror comics in terrible shape so that they are affordable as he just wants to read them) and won a door prize for a giant compendium that had the first 48 or so issues of the Invincible comic. He had no interest in it so he gave it to me. I am curious how loyal to the comic this adaption will be as it certainly goes some places.
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watcing the wandavision finale and it’s wild to me how much these zillion dollar marvel CG battles still are mostly not as exciting or competently storyboarded as the low budget CG on the flash doing a cool splash panel moment or a finale fight on power rangers
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“When we are creating our modern version of classic folklore and mythology, we can’t bother learning how to properly stage or shoot things. We are doing work that is too important for that,” says Kevin Fiege just before diving Scrooge McDuck style into a pile of nerd dollars.
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if the shang chi movie doesn’t break this trend it’s gonna be one of the most depressing things ever made
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From my understanding of Marvel, they essentially hire technical directors to do “cool 3D shit”, and prestige directors to do actual dialogue and character development. That’s why the fights always make for good promotional material but manage to miss so often.
The first Avengers movie is still the tragically low high-water mark for big splashy group fight scene where each hero uses and combines their powers in fun ways. The rest of them have all been even worse and that’s really saying something.
it is a very low bar but for me Captain America: The Winter Soldier is still the best cinematic take on “What if a person was strong” in the MCU
like you don’t need people floating around shooting different colored beams to make super powers visually interesting, you just have to find a way to represent a level of super-strength somewhere in between “really strong normal person” and “able to fling you a half mile with one very weak looking punch.” i don’t think it should be that hard, but apparently it is
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And it’s still shot like a TV movie.
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eternals*
I was pretty sure the end of Wandavision was going to be balls and it was, but I’m still going to watch whatever the fuck they come out with next. I don’t know how they have so much good will from me, so I’m going to post a list of things I liked and we’ll see
- Thor 3
- Guardians of the Galaxy
- Daredevil, Jessica Jones, and Luke Cage all had very fun first seasons
- I watched all of Agents of Shield. It is not canon, it might even be bad, but I enjoyed it a lot
- Oh I liked Dr Strange, Antman, Winter Soldier, Iron Man, Spiderman, uhhh
Ok that’s enough. I can see why I’m into them. Falcon and Winter Soldier is out in 2 weeks. It’ll probably at least start out really well.
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going to talk about the last wandavision episode in vague terms here, avert your eyes if you haven’t seen it yet and care about that i guess
it was pretty bad, and exactly what i was expecting re: punch the mystery to death
i think i realized that all of the worst parts of the show were the pacing of anything outside of the tv sitcom re-creation episodes. like it is just so bizarre that they could have such a deep understanding of various sitcom conventions, but then also not be able to do anything that fit into a 30 minute episode when they weren’t just imitating those conventions directly.
the high point of the show for me was the episode right in the middle where they show what is going on outside wanda’s magic village for the first time, and the show takes on this kind of lowkey x-files vibe. but then after that all of the ‘real world’ segments felt like… equally derivative of other television stereotypes to the point that the contrast between the fake tv world and the ‘real’ world felt kind of meaningless.
the last three episodes, beyond just generating epic memes or whatever, felt like you could just see the show sinking back into the MCU morass from which it emerged, and not in a good way. i guess it could have been worse, but basically everything that i guessed would happen based on my assumption that the most obvious possible thing would definitely occur in every possible scenario. i think that wouldn’t be such a problem if they hadn’t hyped up the last episodes as some kind of mind-bending, universe-expanding game changer.
one thing that i thought was funny and bad but maybe bad in a good way, this is specific enough that i guess i will spoiler tag it:
the mid-credits sequence, where monica rambeau meets a skrull, was literally exactly what i expected would happen, and the whole thing is very confusing because we are not really sure what her superpowers are, or if she still has them now that the hex is gone. i think as a way of introducing that character the show started strong and then flubbed the landing big time, like everything else i guess.
but then in the post credits sequence, despite having all kinds of like unresolved character stuff re: where the fuck did White Vision go, they just cut to wanda in a cabin in the middle of the woods reading an enchanted book. which, like, knowing that sam raimi is directing the doctor strange movie that will presumably pick up where this leaves off, seemed like a very deliberate tease that this is going to just be Evil Dead in the MCU. it’s a hilariously low-brow way to conclude the like serious meditation on grief that the show is theoretically providing.
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you can tell that these people have no imagination because even if you are gonna do the 75th corporate mandated worse version of a dragonball fight, you have at your disposal a character who can literally change reality around herself and you choose to use almost none of that interesting visual language in the fight itself
genuinely curious how a sam raimi movie will look coming out the other side of marvel’s previz department
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I wish I could have seen my expression when watching the payoff of knowing Wanda has to find a way to hurt Agnes that doesn’t involve her hadoukens being just throwing a car at her
But then on the other hand the wizard of oz shoes sticking out from under it were great, it was worth it
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i had entirely forgotten this. fuck! now i am actively looking forward to it!
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