Superheroes and Westerns

I'm only very vaguely aware of the existence of Declan Finn, but he's absolutely right. How could I say otherwise, when I made the same case about westerns in particular in a youtube video over three years ago myself, and was aware of the concept years before that even.

https://boundingintocomics.com/2023/09/05/novelist-declan-finn-explains-the-death-of-superhero-movies-mirrors-mirrors-the-death-of-westerns-and-it-has-nothing-to-do-with-so-called-fatigue/

Friday Art Attack

Before I post the art, let's ramble just a bit. First, some political/social news. People are making a big deal about a couple of Supreme Court decisions that came down yesterday. I think the Z-man has the best take on them:

[T]his case is a good reminder that words on paper will never constrain a ruling class. The letter of the law means nothing to people who have no respect for the spirit of the law. Right now, our ruling class has no respect for the rules that are supposed to govern Western societies. No amount of ink spilling will cause them to change their minds about it.

Another thing worth mentioning that I did not cover in the show is the implied cowardice in these cases. When the Left had the whip hand on the court, they rammed through as much as they could as fast as they could. When the Right has control of the courts it is nothing but baby steps and concessions to the Left. This recent case was a chance to roll back a lot of horrible ideas, but they cucked.

This removes the last argument for voting Republican. We know that when they have control of Congress they will fink on their voters. When they have control of the White House, they will appoint people like John Roberts to the bench. Even with a stacked court the people who vote Republican cannot expect to get anything for their support, so what is the point of voting for a Republican?

Vox Day had a briefer take on it as well. Again; I'm quoting them rather than putting it into my own words, because why not? I agree with both takes and did already before I read them. Even though they appear on the surface to disagree, I don't think that they really do, and both can be equally true.

Conservatives will celebrate this as a great legal victory, and perhaps it is. But the reality is that the damage has already been done, as university educations and the lifelong debt they entail are best avoided by everyone of any color.

However, if the ruling can be successfully applied to an employment context, that could be significant indeed. 

Totally switching gears; my reading. I've read 22 books so far this year. My minimum goal was 12 books, which was kind of weak. I had a "real" goal of 20, which I've now passed, and a stretch goal of 30. I had a "crazy stretch" of 40, but at the rate I'm going, that might actually be possible.

I'm reading more than one book at a time. I tend to read, depending on my mood, 1) a physical book (I'm halfway through my new copy of The Two Towers right now, 2) a Kindle ebook (usually on my Kindle app on my phone, so I can read it wherever I am without having my Kindle device). I just finished Keith Baker's Son of Khyber, the second of the Thorn of Breland Eberron trilogy. 3) a gamebook of some kind. I picked up Drow of the Underdark, which I hadn't read since I first bought it back in the late 3e period, and 4) a pdf gamebook. In this case, I'm actually reading two; Death on the Reik right now, the Warhammer Fantasy Roleplay "director's cut" book by Cubicle 7. I'm also reading The Age of Worms. This one slipped in because I was going back and forth between physical copies of the Dungeon Magazine issues which I had physical copies of (about half of the run on this Adventure Path) and pdfs of the magazine. 

So, I'm 75% done with the Age of Worms, at which point I'll pick up Savage Tide. I'm going to read all of the Adventure Paths, until I run out of ones that I have. This will probably take me several years, because I do it slowly, and there were a lot that came out from Paizo for Pathfinder (and Starfinder.) If I finish Savage Tide this year, I'll be happy with my progress there. I'd also really like to finish all of the Enemy Within plus companions this year, but I suspect that I may not.

And finally, I need to pick up a new ebook since I just finished one late last night. I don't know what I'm going to pick up there yet. It might be a non-fantasy book. I'm considering Levon's Trade by Chuck Dixon, which is a kind of Jack Reacher or Mack Bolan-like vigilante fiction thriller.

Final rambly thought; my wife liked The Flash and in what was perhaps a lapse of judgement, I allowed her to talk me into going back with her to see it after she watched it first without me. I didn't really like it. It wasn't actually terrible, but it was forgettable and kind of insulting. Michael Keaton was certainly the best part of the movie. What did I not like? Ezra Miller. Even assuming that you can divorce his performance from his real life persona (which I cannot completely do), he's just an irritating, obnoxious character. Barry Allen—and keep in mind that I was always more of a Marvel guy than a DC guy, but I've seen a bit here and there of DC as it was when it was good decades ago—is a tall, lean blond guy from a fictional Midwestern city (first vaguely in Ohio, later Missouri) who's a forensic scientist, often a bit of an alpha jokester, and is, in the words of Batman, "[T]he kind of man I wouldn've hoped to become if my parents hadn't been murdered." Like all superheroes of the Golden and Silver Ages, he has an iconic love interest, Iris West, a cute little redhead. Flash isn't awkward and stupid around her, they're already a serious item, if not actually engaged, and they do end up getting married in the comics canon.

Barry Allen in the movies is a super beta Jewish kid afflicted with logorrhea and terminal awkwardness, who's mother, we now find, is Hispanic and who's father is the guy from Office Space. Apparently, the movie division didn't "get the memo" because this character is not only unlikeable, but he's unrecognizable. There is an Iris West, a chubby Halfrican who also bears no resemblance whatsoever to Iris West, but is it least friendly and a bit more likeable than the other Halfrican who played her in the CW soap opera Flash show.

The plot isn't really very bright. A lot of folks have talked about the multiverse angle being overdone by now, but the reality is that the multiverse as a deus ex machina device feels very lazy, and isn't used cleverly. If it were, I don't think that there'd be a problem with it. 

As many have said, the CGI is really had. It almost looks as bad as the cow in Twister from... what, 1996 or so? When did that movie come out? The attempts at a lighthearted Marvel vibe boil down to Barry doing or saying something stupid, and we're supposed to think that it's funny.

Anyway, it's not a terrible movie, but it isn't a good one either, and as an adaptation of the Flash character, it's particularly egregious, as DEI casting decisions and super beta writers who can't imagine what a normal person acts like completely ruin its ability to emulate anything recognizable. But, as an alternate version of a speedster character who also happens to have an old Batman (Michael Keaton in Dark Knight Returns; how awesome would that be?) and a Hispanic dykish Supergirl, it's still only... OK. 

There are a lot of rationales being tossed around by entertainment self-proclaimed pundits for its failure. I think all of them have some merit. I have no doubt that Ezra Miller's own behavior is a factor. As is general superhero fatigue. As is James Gunn's rebooting of the DC franchise and getting rid of Henry Cavill only to cast a discount Henry Cavill who literally looks almost just like him except a bit younger. I think by far the biggest factor is just that the Flash character as he's been written and portrayed thus far just isn't a very likeable character, and nobody really wanted to see a movie that not only focused almost solely on him, but literally had two of him on screen for most of the movie.

About superhero fatigue, I think it's a mistake to call superhero fatigue a problem that audiences have. In reality, it's a problem creators have. When they get to the point that the creators are fatigued with a genre, and just churn them out formulaicly without any love for a paycheck, or try to subvert them or do something different with them because they fundamentally don't really want to make a superhero movie, that's when you've got superhero fatigue. The same thing happened with the Western in the late 60s and early 70s. I don't think the audience tired of them. The studios and creatives tired of them, and stopped making them in such a way that audiences would like them. And then, of course, audiences were blamed for moving on and abandoning the genre rather than the creatives, who were by that time making anti-Westerns that turned the tropes of the Western completely on its head, but wore the superficial trappings like a skinsuit. The same thing has happened to superhero movies. Sure, audiences don't like what's being made. But that's because the creatives have turned the superhero movie upside down and are wearing its superficial trappings like a skinsuit. Audiences aren't that stupid. They know when a superhero movie isn't really a superhero movie anymore.

Anyway, enough of all that. Here's the art attack.

First, a few bright and polite retro-futurist pieces of art. When I was a kid in the 70s and 80s, a lot of this kind of gee whiz futurism was still very popular, and because I had an interest in science, science fiction, and related topics, I saw a lot of this kind of stuff at the school and public libraries where I was devouring anything that looked vaguely on topic.

Some Wayne Reynolds. The last one is Eberron, but the first two are 4e pieces. I haven't seen nearly as much of his work as I used to. I think either his star is fading and he's not being picked up as the iconic face of the brand art, like he used to be for Wizards, Paizo and Green Ronin (among others) or he's just moved on to doing different stuff.

Some wererats or skaven-like monsters, or something like that. I'm a big fan of that kind of thing particularly, but this is a different Wayne Reynoldsish take. I actually think that this might be a Wayne Reynolds piece, but I'm not 100% sure, because I don't see his initials on it, and I can't remember where I found the digital image anymore. I've had it for a long time.

I love this kind of rainy, grubby, dark fantasy Medieval horror kind of vibe. This isn't the only piece I have like this, but this is as good as any that I do have.

A couple of AI generated girls; Snow White and the Tomb Raider, respectively. Given that both are about to get live action remakes, or so we hear, that I won't want to see (the first starring a race-swapped Hispanic Snow White and the latter starring Phoebe Waller-Bridge, who may actually be more unlikeable than Brie Larsen even—and certainly less attractive) I thought these images of what they should look like will stand as a testimony against whatever we actually get.

A few updates

Three updates on unrelated subjects. I've made a goal to read books again, since I feel like I had spent a lot of my time frittering away free time online. I did pretty good in January, but February was slower due to real world concerns turning my free time into "constrained 'free' time" where I had committed much of it to other things, not to mention stress due to work, and having picked up a book that although I've read before a long time ago, I found less compelling than I'd hoped, so I slowed way down. I did, however, just recently finish Thomas M. Reid's The Temple of Elemental Evil novel, which I found as a mobi somewhere years ago and just got around to reading just now. It's not very cheap on the used market, and it's been out of print for a long time, but I don't recommend going to the trouble, frankly. It was kind of interesting in the sense that it played out just like a D&D adventure, but that made it play our relatively poorly as a novel, and the attempts to create charismatic characters out of the D&D characters was pretty flat except maybe in one or two of them at best. That makes my sixth book so far this year, and if I keep up that rate; three a month, that will get me to 36 books this year. My low bar goal was 12, so I'm halfway there, but my real goal was 20 and my stretch was 30. I did have hopes to surpass even that, though. Four of the six are not novels, though—they're game books. And the two novels are both D&D tie-in fiction. I'm ready to break out into better material.

So I need to power through my new copy of Ivanhoe, which is a great book, but isn't written to be a gripping page-turner, I have to admit, and pick something else off my Kindle to read in tandem. And I need to get back into my read-through of Age of Worms, which has also stalled after reading the third adventure. After I finish reading my new copy of Ivanhoe, which is admittedly a pretty cool copy, then I'll watch my new copy on blu-ray of the Robert Taylor and Elizabeth Taylor version of the movie too. It's a bit less faithful to the book in some ways, but not to its detriment; it actually improves the pacing, if nothing else. Plus, young Elizabeth Taylor from the early 50s; I mean, you just can't go wrong. Wowza. I'm not sure what I'll read next in the Kindle and physical space, but I'm going to make sure that both of what's on deck has nothing to do with gaming. 

I've also made most of the updates I talked about in my past post to the Dark Fantasy X document. I'm going to let it "rest" for a day or two, before doing a final review and making sure that nothing was missed that needs to be edited out (I actually found that I'd left hit points instead of health in a number of places when I went back to reverse that change. I might review it, let it sit again for a couple of days, and then review it again. I always find another couple of errors when I do that that I'd missed in my first pass.) I'm also still a bit unsure about a few of the changes I made to the classes, specifically the Expert class, where I made some updates, but I'm not 100% sold on them being the best deal I could have thought of. More time to let it marinate and then hopefully I'll either feel better about the changes, or think of some slight tweaks that improve it even more. The image above is an alternate cover image I whipped up in Midjourney for the game, and I thought I'd add it just to make the post feel less like a big ole wall of text.

Thirdly, the internet is abuzz with news of Ant-man 3 and its performance. By the internet, I mean the youtube pop culture criticism channels which kind of bag on wokeness as a marketing ploy, while they read articles that anyone else could find, and annotate them with a lot of smarmy "I told you so, go woke go broke, etc." guys, like Geeks & Gamers, Ryan Kinnel, Nerdrotic, Overlord DVD, HeelsvsBabyFace, Yellowflash2, Critical Drinker, and even more liberal folks like Clownfish TV, and more. While I tend to agree with a lot of what these guys say, and much of what they say is just regurgitated journalism from someone else anyway, I find their schticks kind of annoying after a while. Even if they're right, do we need to constantly beat the drum on that? I'm pretty much ready to just not think anymore about Star Wars, Marvel, Disney, or Netflix, etc. The point and yell routine of the pessimists just brings more attention to these products. While I don't agree that all press is good press, or at least bad press usually isn't good enough press, I think at this point, I'm more than willing to just let this stuff go and not keep complaining about it. It's already been happening nonstop for years. There's nothing new to say that hasn't been said over and over again already. Plus, making sure that you release new videos three or four times a day, when all you're doing is stretching a story that I could find myself in the trades, or on Breitbart, or Bounding Into Comics, or somewhere, is kind of a waste of my time. If I really want that news, it'd be faster to just go read it myself. I do still watch at least some of their videos, especially analysis of box office and sales and ratings, because that's where I think it's the most interesting, and that's where the Ant-man story has something interesting to say.

Like I said in my own off-hand review, the movie isn't really that bad (some of the YouTube rage heads will tell you it's terrible. It's not. It's just mediocre, forgettable, formulaic, and rather poorly structured.) But regardless of the movie's quality or lack thereof, it's clear that it's not performing financially as well as Marvel must have hoped. The trade media is sometimes trying to spin the sales, but when you compare them to other movies, even other Ant-man movies, its performance isn't good. Given that this was supposed to be the grand launch of Phase V, that must be a bit worrying to Disney and Marvel. Sure, the thumbs on the Youtube videos are all "PANIC" and "DISASTER" and worried face Paul Rudd, Kevin Feige or Bob Iger with photoshopped tears running down their cheeks. It may not be that dramatic, because the copium amongst wokesters who are deeply embedded in their cult is pretty hard. But I'm sure that failing to hit financial targets or expectations for this movie can't be good. 

On top of that, it keeps piling on. The new Patel Pan and Blackerbell with the Lost They/Them girl/boys, and the Little Black Mermaid are not endearing Disney as a corporation to audiences, even mainstream "normies", and I'm sure that this avalanche of wokeness is paying negative dividends on the Ant-man box office as well. People are sick and tired of hearing how much Disney hates them and wants to see them replaced with resentful, covetous, entitled brown people in their own white homeland of America. Ironically, black retellings of white stories aren't necessarily bad. I still remember The Wiz, the blacksploitation musical retelling of The Wizard of Oz on Broadway and later the cult classic movie. But The Wiz wasn't dishonest about what it was. It was, "hey, what if we made a soul-remake of The Wizard of Oz?", not "Hey, what if we overtly discriminate against white people in our casting as a passive agressive insult to white people everywhere and pretend that that's normal and that white people are racist if they don't like it?"

As the recession deepens, we'll see how well the entertainment industry is able to weather their decision to spit on the largest segment of their target audience. We'll also see how well the Great Replacement will continue as the economy sours, since everyone honest knows that the overwhelmingly most common reason these Third Worlders are in America (and Europe) in the first place is because they've been told that they're just giving away free money to brown people if they show up in white countries. Both of these trends are unsustainable, but exactly how and when they will break, and what the final result will be when the shaking stops is harder to predict.

Phase 5

So, in spite of my desires, my wife bought Antifa-Man and the Wasp: Commiemania tickets for us to see last night. We don't go very often on opening weekends, even to movies that we want to see, because we don't want to contribute to the all-important opening weekend metric, plus we get half price tickets on Tuesday evening. I would have missed it altogether, but my wife loves seeing movies and is desperate to be in denial of how bad Hollywood in general and Disney in particular are as companies. After we watched it, I allowed her to convince me to binge the Loki show too. Now I'm kind of tired.

In spite of all the hate and anger from the angry anti-Disney pundits, the reality is that neither Loki nor Ant-man were really that bad. In fact, although hardly even close to brilliant, they were relatively fun. Although I did notice the things that the anger-pundits pointed out, they were neither as egregious, or blatant as they claimed, and many of them (like heroic black action women who are as physically capable as any man among the extras and minor characters) we'll just have to deal with until the zeitgeist changes. Scott Lang wasn't made to be an idiot constantly upstaged by all the women around him. His daughter was kinda bratty, but not nearly as terrible a character as I'd been led to believe. She can't carry a movie, like Ant-man kinda can.

Don't get me wrong. In both, there were certainly woke elements. But neither were flat out propaganda films, like we have had in the past from Disney. Nothing was as on the nose as "You've got to do better, Senator" Falcon & the Winter Soldier. Nothing was as subtly insidious as The Batman.

If you don't want to see these movies at all, I hardly blame you. If you want to do like my wife and I did and see the movie while still managing to not really contribute to their "success" because of our timing and discount tickets, on the other hand, I hardly blame you for that either. They really aren't that bad. They're forgettable, mostly. They're not going to be classics. But I don't regret seeing them, and I'm actually a little excited about seeing the next season of Loki, believe it or not. Owen Wilson and Paul Rudd and Tom Hiddleston are sufficiently charismatic and have sufficient charisma to carry the current crop of stuff, and hopefully the next wave. That doesn't mean that anything in the pipeline other than the next season of Loki looks promising. Iron Heart? No way in hell. Anything Wakanda related? Absolutely not. For that matter, within Ant-man itself, anything with Janet, Hank, or Hope or Cassie? I'd rather give all of those characters a pass. Sylvie and Loki and Mobius, on the the other hand—they can actually carry something worth watching with their chemistry and charisma.

Jonathan Majors, or whatever his name is, as Kang? He's been getting a lot of praise from the critics as if he's the next big thing who's already the biggest big thing. I'd never heard of him at all. I have a mixed reaction to his casting and performance. For one thing, I don't think casting Kang as a fairly normal looking black guy with gigantic lips and huge spreading nose was the right look at all for the character. I also don't think that the character he portrayed had any resemblance to Kang as a character as I know him. That said, I've never thought Kang was really all that engaging of a character, and other than his blue face (with narrow lips and nose) with the lines on it, his look was neither memorable nor exciting. He's even more boring than Galactus, who's another character who's actually way cooler in many ways than he looks to be. 

Plus, were they trying to set up a joke where the "Council of Kangs" all gathers together and says "We wuz kangz?"

So, didn't look right, the character was all wrong, but the character wasn't all that exciting to begin with? Majors did, I'll admit, do a good job portraying the character that was written for him. That's certainly true. He wasn't as charismatic on screen as people are making him out to be, because he honestly came across as kind of goofy, though. Especially in the Loki show. His face is nearly as overly dramatically expressive as Jackie Chan's. And honestly, there was a slightly uncomfortable undercurrent every time I saw him of his casting being a result of some ESG wanker saying, "We've gotta cast a black guy here". That said, his performance showed some real talent. Just not sure that this was really the role for him or not.

And... well, multiverse alternate realities, parallel timelines, and time travel in general have never been my favorite plot devices, unless the point is to go see dinosaurs. 

All in all, I'd say that my reaction here has been a variety of "Yeah, OK, I can see what you're going for here, and you're actually trying to be entertaining, and you're trying to tamp down the wokeness to a level that it isn't literally pissing off your audience non-stop... but I suspect the damage has been done already." It's a little too late to suggest that, "OK, OK, we're going to tone down the wokeness (but not eliminate it entirely) and try to be fun again" after you've already gone all in on grooming little kids and telling white people how much they hate them. On top of that, I think that people are just a little over Marvel now. Few of the characters that the audience love (Paul Rudd and Tom Hiddleston's characters being a notable exceptions) are still around, and even when they are, they're saddled with often playing second fiddle to new characters that aren't likeable. The "Ant-man family" could all take a hike except for Ant-man himself, and nobody would miss any of them. The vague references to socialism and antifa from Hank and Cassie were designed to make them unlikeable, and poor Hope just has literally nothing to do, no chance to show any charisma or charm, no chance to even really do anything at all. And Janet comes across as an obnoxious, entitled princess who makes no apologies for 1) sleeping with other men while in the quantum realm, 2) not telling anybody anything about the quantum realm, and 3) generally being high-handed and self-important and insufferable. Sadly, I think the writers think it makes her look like a strong girlboss, an insufferable trope in its own right, but it doesn't; if anything, it highlights her weakness.

Disney

I don't really like the anti-woke YouTube ecosystem all that much. I watch a lot of videos from guys like Overlord, Ryan Kinel, The Quartering, Nerdrotic, Adam Post, etc. But mostly, I feel like these guys are all on the exact same page; they agree with each other on everything—suspiciously lockstep—and tend to make sure that people on the internet who disagree with wokeness don't wander too far off of the plantation. At all cost, even losing the gay mafia and feminism to Florida, etc. is OK as long as nobody challenges the hoaxes of racism and especially anti-semitism. That's the real goal; keep people enslaved to those two cons.

Anyway, in spite of that, they do say a lot of good stuff sometimes, which is why I still watch a lot of their videos.

This one is pretty good.

Movies

Because I was traveling last Friday, and because my wife loves movies and had the day off, she spent the entire day at the theatre watching movies that mostly I wasn't interested in. See, actually I love movies too, but I've become very jaded and cynical about most movies made in the Woke Era, and I've actively been turned off from seeing franchises like Star Wars or Marvel anymore. So, she gambled that I wouldn't want to see any of the movies that she had slated, except maybe the last one, which I actually had time to finish driving, get home, and go meet her at the theatre to see with her. Her itinerary, annotated by me.

Elvis. I'd actually heard relatively good things about this movie, and wouldn't have minded seeing it. She thought it was pretty mediocre and won't want a repeat viewing, however. Granted, she doesn't really like any kind of musical all that much on principle with the exception of animated Disney movies. And even those have mostly disappointed her in the last several years, although she's loath to admit it. It's possible that I'd appreciate this movie more than she did. Possibly. But maybe not. My excitement was more along the lines that I'd heard good enough things about it that maybe it was a movie I could see with her and not hate myself for watching. If she doesn't even want to see it with me, then there's not much point in me watching it just for me.

Thor: Love and Thunder. She didn't like this. I didn't expect to like anything at all about it either. For all of the reasons that nobody else is liking it; it tries too hard to be funny all of the time without actually being so, Thor himself is a big, dumb character who goes through the exact same story arc over and over again movie after movie, and nobody else is likeable either. And the plot is stupid beyond all reason.

I don't think she even caught the post-credits scene where Jewish Hercules is introduced. Ironically, he's supposed to be the likeable dumb jock of the Marvel Universe (who is now inexplicable gay in the comics... but who reads those anyway?) Thor has been unexpectedly saddled with Herc's personality in the movies, but Herc will probably not suffer indignation after indignation like Thor has had to; i.e., he'll get the more classic Thor personality. After all, Thor is white and Herc is Jewish and was raised in a strip club, so he's clearly morally superior. Nevermind that the actual ancient Greeks weren't nearly as Levantine genetically as the current ones are, and Homer constantly describes blond and red haired Greek heroes. Meanwhile, Jewish Herc didn't even have to bulk up to take the part. He looks like a piker compared to Chris Hemsworth. Sigh.

Where the Crawdads Sing. While I appreciate the correct usage of the word crawdad, I expect is was deliberate to evoke a bumpkin Southerner outlook by the smug author. That said, my wife said that this was a more interesting than expected murder mystery. Where I expected a chick-flick, that's not what she described, or what a viewing of the trailer suggests either. Maybe it's a murder chick-flick like Fried Green Tomatoes? I dunno. I might actually sit down and watch this with her at some point later.

Minions: The Rise of Gru. We were both pleasantly surprised when we went to see Bad Guys (I mean, I'm 50 and she's 49, and our youngest kid is 18.) It was actually quite charming and well done. We're not too proud to watch a movie made for kids if its charming. We'd always enjoyed the Despicable Me series so far well enough, but she said this one doesn't really live up to the legacy; it's pretty mediocre.

The Gray Man. This is the one that I saw with her. It'll be available for Netflix streaming in a couple of days, so when my 20-year old son is back in town briefly between college semesters, I'm going to sit down with him and watch it. It's a Russo Brothers production, and my son does follow Hollywood specific people and the Russo Brothers are on his very narrow watch-list. I think he'll enjoy it. Ryan Gosling plays the titular Gray Man, a super-spy of sorts who ends up on the wrong side of a corrupt CIA director. Chris Evans plays himself, just as he did in Knives Out, except this time more violent. Ana de Armas is completely unconvincing as an American agent with a super-strong Cuban accent; although I will say that the action scenes, while over-the-top, didn't make me roll my eyes at her stronk wamman approach; I was able to suspend my disbelief as well watching her beat people up as I was watching Gosling to the same. I actually quite liked this movie, and recommend it, in spite of my flippant comments here. 

My favorite moments, and minor spoiler alerts for the rest of this paragraph here, were watching Chris Evans get his fingers blown off with a flare gun fired by a 13-year old girl, watching Chris Evans get his head smashed into a giant flower pot, watching Chris Evans getting choked out, watching Chris Evans get shot and watching Chris Evans' dead body floating in a fountain.

While there's still obviously lots of garbage in the pipeline coming from Hollywood, because the lead-time for a movie is many years, I think the tide has turned on Wokeness in movies. There has developed a wide-spread acceptance of the idea that woke movies are big flops now, and everytime one does, normal people everywhere point at it and laugh (Lightyear) while notably non-woke movies like the Top Gun sequel are making super-huge bank, even without catering to the Chinese market. It'll take some time for the ship to turn, but I think in general, the "powers that be" have started spinning the wheel at least in an attempt to start the process.

Or maybe that's just wishful thinking. Hollywood is, after all, merely a mouthpiece for the greater Cloud People cult of hating the Dirt People and wanting to see them suffer in any way possible.

UPDATE: As an aside on the Love and Thunder debacle, which is about pagan gods getting their comeuppance in a not very transparent swipe at religion overall, I tend to like the Survive the Jive channel on YouTube, but he hasn't done much lately, and he seems to be talking more and more about paganism rather than history and prehistory. He posted a conference speech he gave, which I watched a few minutes of, and it was curious to see him specifically thank Ing and Woden, his two patron gods, for making it all happen. The modern neo-pagan movement is, to me, somewhat bizarre. I get it and yet don't at the same time. I understand people; especially frustrated, increasingly disenfranchised and dispossessed white men, wanting to get in touch with their ancestors and their beliefs, but the idea that we can create a meaningful pagan belief system out of what little we know about what the pagan Anglo-Saxons (or even the pagan Vikings) actually believed is ludicrous. It'd be like trying to recreate Christianity with a few dozen scattered pages from the Bible. It's hard for me to believe that modern neo-pagans like Rowsell from Survive the Jive honestly believe in the existence of the same pagan gods that their pagan Anglo-Saxon ancestors supposedly prayed to, and if they do, then they certainly know very little about what those ancestors thought or believed about them, or how they related to their lives. Neo-paganism is a somewhat desperate and pathetic attempt, well-meaning in some ways though it may be, to connect with our ancestors in a society that constantly attempts to villainize our ancestors. It's little more than ancestor worship by proxy; repeating rituals and phrases and boutique beliefs without any understanding of whatever context our ancestors may have attached to them (to the extent that we have anything to repeat, and aren't just making stuff up anyway.) Embracing a pagan identity today seems more about making a political and social statement that you reject modernity and it's sterile hatred of anything white than it does about having a real spiritual belief system such as what one expects from a normal religion.

It's kind of the opposite situation of the other pagan movement of the last few decades, the Wiccan and Wiccan-like movement. Those pagans were merely very low-status weirdos looking to create a community where they could be as weird as they wanted to be and still find acceptance, of sorts, in a group of like-minded people. They basically rejected normal, healthy, functional society because they wanted to continue being weird, unhealthy and dysfunctional. The neo-pagans who are into Viking paganism or whatever, on the other hand, aren't necessarily high status, but they're more normal people who are rejecting the weird, unhealthy and dysfunctional modern society, which has changed a lot since the 80s or 90s, but they're throwing out the baby with the bathwater. I'm kind of sympathetic to them, but at the same time, I don't think creating a religious identity from scratch and a few references from Beowulf and stuff appropriated from Saxo Grammaticus or Snorri Sturluson is really the answer.

The Batman

If the movie is actually good and entertaining, in some ways that's almost worse. Race-swapping Commissioner Gordon and Catwoman (even if that was first done way back when the cast Eartha Kitt to replace Julie Newmar in the late 60s) just normalizes the process, increasing the theft of American culture and heritage from actual Americans by the Fake kind who hate us.

Oh, I'll see it. My wife already bought tickets for Saturday morning matinee for us, my daughter and her boyfriend, in fact. But I'm a bit wary and my expectations aren't super high. The movie industry has long been inhabited by the absolute worst kinds of people (read Shirley Temple's autobiography where (((Arthur Freed))) exposed himself to her when she was 11 while in the office next door, (((Louis B. Mayer))) was groping and sexually assaulting her mother; (((David Selznick))) chased her around a locked room when she was 15, (((Samuel G. Engel))) tried to rape her, and (((George Jessel))) sexually assaulted her. All while she was underaged, sometimes dramatically underaged. 

And as the last few years have given them license, so they feel, to rip the mask off of their hate, it's hardly surprising that even relatively decent and entertaining movies will vandalize and loot white people for their stuff with this kind of race swapping. The Daredevil show did it too, by oddly race swapping Ben Ulrich. It's just ubiquitous. But Gordon and Catwoman aren't relatively minor characters.

Shang-Chi

What do you get if you start with the 80s version of Oriental Adventures and add to it a reluctant superhero story with a plank of wood protagonist, give him an occasionally amusing sidekick, and throw in some gratuitous grrrrrl power, but just shy of being actively obnoxious? Shang-Chi the movie, of course.

I know that it's been out for a couple of weeks now, but I refuse to give Disney the satisfaction of a full price ticket on opening weekend. $5 tickets and free popcorn is what our theater does on Tuesdays to try and put a few more butts in a few more seats, and I'm game even to see a Disney movie under those conditions, even though Disney is one of the most evil and hateful companies in existence right now (which is saying a lot). Mostly because my wife really loves to go see movies and is determined to look past the hateful, anti-white, anti-male wokeness agenda unless it's way too in your face to ignore. So, while I'm tempted to simply dog on the movie for featuring a white-hating, ungrateful, entitled, bratty little princess as its star—who also happens to think pedophiles are just misunderstood—who can feel free to go back home to China like all of the other Fake Americans anytime now, or even Canada if they'll take him—I don't think I will. He's not a very interesting character in the movie. But then again, since when was Shang-Chi ever an interesting character anyway? The guy was created as a copycat Bruce Lee during the height of the Bruce Lee Hong Kong theatre and the Kung Fu television show with David Carradine, but which technically was an adaptation or spin-off of Sax Rohmer's Fu Manchu stories. Since the ridiculous school of fish mentality of the SJWs now suggests that Fu Manchu is racist—because, of course it is. It's just such a go-to complaint. It's like the ketchup of SJW condiments; you put it on everything—Shang-Chi's father is no longer Fu Manchu, so they had to invent another group of Chinese ninja/Yakuza (yes, I know) with another guy to run it to be his father. And they had to give him a sister who, despite the fact that she's a tiny little girl and her "training" involved watching her brother during the day, and going out by herself in the training yard at night, is actually a better fighter than he is.

Sigh. So, yeah—the premise is beyond silly, and the steps to get there are worse than what most D&D campaigns have as their McGuffin multipart quests. But that hasn't stopped a Marvel movie before. And yes, the character is beyond D-lister. And the actor who plays him isn't really all that charismatic (plus, he sympathizes with pedophiles, remember). And his comic sidekick is Awkwafina, who is only occasionally charming. She once characterized herself as "Asian Ellen" but that was back when people in Hollywood, at least, as well as woke, bored, virtue-signaling housewives were still pretending that Ellen was charming and likeable (spoiler alert: no, she wasn't.) When they get to D&D Oriental Adventures land, I seriously thought that they got Jeff Easley to do concept art for the movie. I'm not even kidding here. 

All in all, while I've heard Marvel's Phase Four characterized as Phase Bore, I don't think it's been terrible yet. In fact, I've now seen a handful of Disney movies, including Marvel's belated Black Widow movie and the Jungle Cruise movie, which were both... OK. Shang-Chi's kind of right there with them; it's got just enough charisma to make it worth seeing... if the tickets are $5 each and the popcorn is free and it's a couple of weekends after opening so that you're not really giving Disney anything that they can brag to their investors about. But otherwise, just wait a few months, and it'll be on your Disney+ subscription for free soon enough. (Did I mention that my wife was a long time Disney fan since the 80s? She's been to DisneyWorld I think twenty times so far in her lifetime. Of course we have Disney+, even though I'd drop it in a heartbeat if it were only me to consider.) Better yet, just wait, and see it for free sometime soon, or rent it from Redbox or whatever. It's not a great movie.

But, if you listen to the usual suspects who peddle Disney doom and gloom pr0n, you'd think the movie was absolutely terrible and was bombing big time. It may be doing the latter for all I know, but it isn't really terrible. Just mediocre.

And, like I said, if you were a fan of the 80s Oriental Adventures supplement at all, then you'll probably get a kick out of the last third or so of the movie, at least.

Black Widow

Just got back from seeing the Black Widow movie. I actually wasn't going to see it, both because I'm irked generally at Disney and don't want to support them even indirectly in any financial sense, but secondly because a lot of the folks I follow on YouTube about pop culture, like Geeks + Gamers, Nerdrotic, Critical Drinker, Overlord DVD, etc. have panned it. Not all of them, but I know for sure Critical Drinker and Nerdrotic didn't like it. So, when my wife bought tickets for all of us tonight, I kinda zipped my criticisms and went anyway, because I knew it was important for her to get out and see a movie as a family. Even though I wished she'd asked me what to see before buying them.

Turns out, the movie wasn't as bad as everyone I'd read made it out to be. Oh, sure—it wasn't great either. It was pretty mediocre as far as Marvel movies go, and to be honest with you, that's probably as good as they're going to get for quite some time in the future. Now, to be fair, I've already seen this story. It was called the Street Fighter Alpha series of video games, and it involved a character named Cammy. Here's her complete story. If you get the parts from the Alpha subseries in particular, that's an almost note by note blueprint for the plot of Black Widow. Except, of course, that the villain in the movie was nowhere near as cool as M. Bison. (In fact, it almost seems like he's deliberately a Harvey Weinstein stand-in.) And the Street Fighter plots tend to kind of repeat, so very similar beats were still going on with Cammy in SF4 and SF5 in most respects. 

If you know the story of Cammy from Street Fighter, then you pretty much know the story of this movie, because it's almost exactly the same. Except with a few Marvel references thrown in here and there, although fewer than you'd think. It's also got a notable resemblance to the story of the Jason Bourne stories. And also, it makes me wonder why Captain America was so special and everyone was after the super soldier serum, when it seems quite obvious that people with super soldier serum knock-offs were kind of a dime a dozen in the current version of the Marvel Universe. Even if this Red Guardian is as much a knock-off of Zangief as he is of the comic book version of his character.

It also occurs to me that some of the guys who complain about pop culture ruination... well, that's kind of their thing, and what brings the audiences to them. So, while I kind of tend to agree with them on general principle, sometimes it's worth taking their trashing of a movie with a grain of salt.

So I don't necessarily recommend this movie, but I don't exactly disrecommend it either. The feminist "oh noez the poor victims, now they're getting their revenge" line that I feared that movie would lean into didn't really materialize too much; it felt more like a personal story of the tragedy of individuals rather than some agitprop to make people feel bad about themselves and that the world owes them something even when they're already the most spoiled, entitled bratty little princesses that the world has ever known. So, that's good, I suppose. David Harbour's Red Guardian didn't end up being very effective, or smart, or anything else like that in the end, but he also wasn't really the butt of every single joke either, like I feared he would be.

The idea that pretty little lightweight women would be these awesome combat machines is kinda silly, and while I'm starting to get tired of that idiotic trope, it is kind of integral to the plot here, and it does predate Marvel really having much hint of wokeness. I mean, the Black Widow character was first published in 1964 fer cryin' out loud. And I am deliberately comparing it repeatedly to Street Fighter, which is probably the franchise most responsible for pushing the idea that tiny little women could be capable in hand to hand combat because of speed and agility.

The only thing I didn't like that really merits a total call-out, and Nerdrotic really went on about this too, was the pointless complete reimagining of the Taskmaster character to make an attempt to get a cheap "a-ha!" moment. Which fell pretty flat because they've done exactly that same a-ha moment several times already. It's, if anything, a very tired attempted reveal, and kind of insulting. Plus, it was handled very ham-handedly. Look at the stuntman who played Taskmaster for the action scenes, with a mask on. Screenshot from Nerdrotic.

But when the mask comes off, it's .... Olga Kurylenko with scar prosthetics on half of her face? C'mon. I know Kurylenko hasn't had a high profile much of anything going on since... what, Quantum of Solace in 2008, but that's kind of insulting even so to misuse her so. She used to be somebody, by golly! Anyway, sex swapping of minor characters that they think that they can get away with without causing too much of an outcry is so overdone, and actually, people are mostly just irritated that it happens at all nowadays. Although race swapping is probably even more insulting (speaking of which, saw the Eternals trailer before the movie too. I've seen it before, of course, on my phone, but this is the first time in theaters. Also saw the new Suicide Squad. They're hyping the involvement of pedophile James Gunn, so Hollywood is obviously anxious to declare him forgiven for tweeting about pedophilia, rape and AIDS. He is half Jewish, after all. I mean, they even brought monkey-spanking Jeff Toobin back to the air only a few weeks after his fall from grace. Then again, he's full Jewish, so the time that they had to pretend to be mad at him was much shorter. And he's not as high profile, so they probably thought that nobody really cared all that much about him personally.

Hollywood really is Sodom & Gomorrah.

Endgame spoilers and where do we go from here?

I'm going to assume that most people will have seen Endgame now.  It's probably going to be the biggest movie in decades, it's breaking all kinds of records for ticket sales and attendance, and it's been out for... well, depending on exactly who you ask and exactly what you count as the opening day (last Wednesday? Or Thursday?  Or are you a stodgy traditionalist who just says Friday) for nearly a week.  Even the slower of my acquaintances to get to the theater mostly saw it by yesterday evening, and those who haven't are the ones who've only seen some of the Marvel movies anyway and tend to just not really be movie people and don't care and don't follow them.

HOWEVER, if you're one of the few people left who still hasn't seen it yet, by all means, avoid this post.  I'm not going to make any effort to avoid spoilers.

And... for that matter, I'm going to assume that if you want to read a review where we discuss whether or not the movie is good, fun, well-crafted, etc. that you can find dozens of them within seconds without any problem.  I'll mention that yes, it is most of those things, and that I highly recommend it (I've already got tickets for a second showing with my wife later this week).  The movie is fun.  The plot is pretty good.  But, as always, it's less about the plot and more about 1) the interaction of charismatic characters who have good chemistry and are fun to watch together, and 2) slam-bang superhero action scenes.  As long as the movie has those two things, the only thing that we require of the plot is that it be serviceable, not necessarily that it be brilliant.

And that's probably true.  I tend to not like time travel story lines very much, and this clearly is one, so the plot has already got issues from my point of view, but they do a good job of not making that too strange and bizarre and full of deus ex machina, which are major concerns for time travel stories.  But honestly, the plot kind of takes a back seat to just going along for the ride for large chunks of the movie.

It really is divided into three acts which are very, very different types of movies; the first is a solemn, somber, and rather slow drama as characters come to terms with the fact that half of all people, randomly selected, are dead.  When a possible solution presents itself, the movie turns into a heist movie, as various teams time-travel about gathering the Infinity Stones so that Thanos won't be able to get them.  This does work, and the people are brought back, but of course there is something that is overlooked, Thanos gets wind of what's happening, and shows up with his whole army to put a stop to it at the rural Avengers headquarters in New York.  This third act is the huge, big, superhero action movie, and it's spectacular, long, features lots of characters, and giving many of them at least a brief moment to shine.  Although "everyone" is brought back by the magic of the stones, that's not literally true, of course, and a few characters have to sacrifice themselves heroically—something that today's entitled, self-absorbed generation probably doesn't get; the idea of two or three soldiers dying in a war of defense doesn't make sense to a generation who thinks that everyone should win without any personal sacrifice.  I was a bit worried that they'd drop the ball on this, given the recent Captain Marvel movie and it's focus on exactly that—that she never earned anything, she just always had it handed to her.  But here, that's not the case, luckily—MAJOR SPOILERS—both Black Widow and Iron Man are killed for real, and the Hulk is seriously injured, maybe permanently (?)  Captain America phases out by using the time travel mechanism to go back home to his own time and have the life that he didn't get to because of being frozen in the ice.  This nicely deals with the fact that both Chris Evans and Robert Downey Jr. have now made all of the Marvel movies on their contract and don't want to renew; so their characters are nicely handled, written out in a way that isn't cheap, and which works very well.

OK, OK, so now, what are people on the Right saying about this movie, and how valid are their criticisms?  And since the Right is right, what does that mean for the franchise in the future?  That, I think, is a more interesting discussion than whether or not the movie is "good"—it is, but you can hear that from hundreds of other voices.  Here, there are a few points to be made:

First, there are two moments of over-the-top, in-your-face virtue-signaling wokeness, but they are so forced, obvious, and mercifully short that they are almost more comical than irritating.  (Almost).  When one of the Russo brothers (the directors) makes a cameo during an AA-like therapy session, and is talking about going on a gay date and how sad it is because everyone's sad because so many people are gone, it's a little absurd, and when every single woman character makes a ridiculous pose, claiming that they'll protect Spider-man (or whomever it was at that point) during the final battle, it was comically unserious.  They also keep throwing Wakanda around as if it's the most interesting and realistic and desirable society on earth instead of a bizarre fantasy based around both an idea and a character who simply aren't very interesting.  But luckily, these strange woke-signals aren't sufficient to ruin the movie, although a much better cut would get rid of them altogether.  My assessment?  Minor irritant and something to keep your eye on for the rot that will probably destroy the franchise in the near future, but someone, whether it was the Russos or Feige or someone else, had sufficient discipline to keep the SJWs from ruining this movie, at least.

Second, Captain Marvel.  It certainly looked like Captain Marvel was all set to swoop in and deus ex machina this movie, ruining it at the literal goal-line, but luckily, her presence is incredibly muted.  Some idiot feminist SJWs are running around complaining that she only got fifteen minutes of screen time compared to hours for Iron Man and Thor and Ant-Man and Captain America.  Not only is that stupid, it's surprisingly, understated.  I doubt she even got that much screen time.  Which is good, because she is, amazingly, even more unlikable in this movie than she is in her own movie.  She's like some kind of cancer, destroying everything that she touches.  The Russos—or someone, at least—saw this, in spite of the propaganda that everyone loves Captain Marvel and her movie was a big success, and wisely kept her on the bench as much as possible, and made her role in the resolution of the plot that had literally been building for decades, nonexistent.  As it should have been.

Third, the idea I've seen floated around a lot this last few days or so is that the message of the movie is something to the effect of, "OK, white males, if you accept your role as subservient until you die out and are replaced, we'll let you go out with some dignity at least."  This is primarily based on a few things: Captain America choosing Sam Wilson (Falcon) as his successor, when he comes back at the end is a very old man, while Bucky looks on and the audience wonders why he wasn't picked instead, and Thor acknowledging that the Halfrican "Asgardian" Valkyrie has been the de facto ruler of the small community of refugee Asgardians anyway, and he abdicates in favor of her.  And finally, the assumption that Captain Marvel herself would take on a much bigger role as the chief amongst the Avengers, as well as the focus on Wakandans as the stand-ins for people of Earth instead of Americans, which would have been normal for a movie made in America by Americans for Americans as recently as even a few years or so ago.  But this is both true and untrue at the same time.  Let me break this down just a bit more.

• Yes, Marvel is banking big-time on the supposed popularity of Black Panther and Wakanda, I think, because the first Black Panther movie was a big financial success.  I think this is foolish.  The success of the Black Panther was due to a perfect storm of minority identity politics and virtue-signaling, married to a movie that was better than average.  But I think future installments will stall out; you can't get people to virtue signal how wonderful Africans are forever, and as a big block, Black people in America are notoriously difficult to pin down and get to focus for long on a political or social agenda more complicated that, "I hate white people and want their money and women."  Meanwhile, few of the characters in this sub-franchise are really very interesting; the best thing Black Panther as a character did was in his debut movie, Civil War, where his revenge fantasy vibe, and then willingness to let it go, was probably the most interesting thing that could or will ever happen to him.  My assessment: this can survive as a much reduced "rump state" of the Marvel franchise, probably regardless of what they do, but if they resist the temptation to go too woke and drive away everyone in their audience who isn't a shrieking weirdo or a black person, it can still be reasonably successful.  It will never again achieve the heights of the first movie, though.
• Captain Marvel as the entitled, bratty, narcissistic girl Superman of the MCU is a non-starter.  Sure, sure, the official narrative is that her movie was a big success and made tons of money.  We all know the score, though.  If Disney can't improve the character and rein in Larson's bigoted, hateful comments in public, Captain Marvel as an important character will be infamous as a failure to launch.  The interesting thing is the gossip flying around the internet about her supposed inability to even manage to get along with the rest of the cast, with Don Cheadle, Jeremy Renner, Elizabeth Olson and Chris Hemsworth all having moments publicly where very awkward body language and dialogue in interviews seems to make this obvious, in spite of the professional denials.
• Thor abdicating is actually one of the few good things that we can see in the future for the franchise.  It means that Halfrican Valkyrie will be relegated to cameos, most likely (if even that), while Thor himself is now free to go adventuring with the Guardians of the Galaxy, which should make for a reasonable bright spot in the forecast for future Marvel films.  That, and maybe Spider-man.  The latter is saddled with a relatively bad cast of unlikely supporting characters, but Tom Holland as Spider-man himself is great.  Actually, if they can get rid of Zendaya as a younger, browner version of Brie Larson as his completely unconvincing "love interest" Spider-man could have a bright future.  But I doubt that they will.  They're committed to the woke message of having someone like Zendaya there, so the fact that she's a completely unlikable character played by a completely unlikable actress and that there's no chemistry there at all is unlikely to end up mattering, or even penetrate the minds of the movie-makers that it's a possible issue in the first place.
• Captain America getting old and abdicating his role to, as my son called him flippantly, Blacktain America is not going to be a good move for the franchise either, but it makes some sense in movie, at least.  What few have pointed is that after sampling Diversitopia for a few years, Captain America would much rather just go back and live the life that he had before in a non-diverse America where he could be surrounded by his own people living their own culture more or less unmolested by others (more or less, anyway.)  That's obviously not a message that the movie is trying to convey, but it's there nonetheless. Sam as new Captain America is also a non-starter.  He's just not really very interesting, and his only defining character trait is his loyalty to Steve Rogers personally.  I can't imagine that he can possibly make for an interesting choice in any way whatsoever, or that in attempting to make him interesting and develop him as a character that they could possibly find any direction to go that isn't steeped in wokeness.

Another odd fact is that this movie so nicely wraps up everything that there really isn't any longer any compelling reason to see another Marvel movie, necessarily, and I strongly suspect that a lot of audiences will take it at that and not worry about seeing any more, or at least not religiously expecting to see them all.  There are no credits teasers, there's nothing in the works, and the major plotline is all resolved.  They need to start from scratch, and it's unclear what they could possibly do that would be as well-received.  I suspect most people will see the coda, Spider-man: Homecoming, which is actually a Phase 3 movie, even though it's after the finale of Phase 3.  It will play the role of a kind of encore, I suppose.  What does Phase 4 look like, and how likely is any of it to rise to the heights that Phase 1-3 Marvel did?  Let's have a look at what we know:

• Guardians of the Galaxy 3, now with Thor on the ship too.  Guardians 2 was a step down, in most respects, from the first one, but it was still entertaining.  More curious was the firing of James Gunn, Guardians creator, because he's a pedophile (or at least obsessed with it in a creepy way), which was, of course, "not in line with our corporate values" as said by Disney.  However, he was of course subsequently rehired quietly, and has an executive producer credit in Endgame too.  (I guess pedophilia is a Disney corporate value after all.  Although publicly admitting it isn't a Disney corporate value.)  That said, as much of a disgrace and terrible person as Gunn seems to be, it's hard to deny that his vision for the Guardians movies and space-Marvel overall hasn't been pretty entertaining.  This is the one sub-franchise about which I am actually still kind of excited to see where they go.  Speaking of which, rumors are thick that the arrival of Nova will be a major plot point in the next movie, while teaser scenes in the trailers have hinted at Adam Warlock and the old Guardians team, headed up by Sylvester Stalone having roles in the future too.  There's actually quite a bit of interesting stuff in space-Marvel, and now that Disney have gobbled up Fox and own the rights to the X-men related stuff (like the Shi'arr) they could potentially keep a subset of Marvel as a space opera franchise going for a long time.  Honestly, I think that's by far the brightest future for the franchise.
• Kevin Feige confirmed "off hand" that a Dr. Strange 2 is in the works, but I'm not quite sure that Strange has risen to the level where he can be anything more interesting than the straight man off which Tony Stark played his jokes.
• Black Panther 2 has been confirmed, but I've already given my analysis of what kind of legs I believe that franchise to have.
• A Black Widow solo is confirmed, presumably a prequel.  Could be fun, but where does it go, and how does it tie into the rest of the broader franchise?
• Shang-Chi is supposedly confirmed, although I can't imagine that anyone at all cares.
• An Eternals movie is in the works, supposedly, although again, I have no idea where they go or what they could do with this.  Then again, Thanos was an Eternal (assuming that that's carried forward into the MCU) and even though the Eternals haven't necessarily been super popular, they have been super important as background characters, supporting characters and occasionally villains, and as Guardians of the Galaxy (and for that matter, Thor, Captain America, and Iron Man themselves) show, the MCU can take a low popularity comic book and turn it into a highly successful movie, if they do it right.
• Although nothing has been announced, Disney's acquisition of Fox allows for the full, final integration of the mutant and Fantastic Four stuff into the MCU, which of course, opens up lots of possibilities that no doubt they've already given loads of thought to.  Although with the exception of about half of the X-men movies, I'd suggest that the bankability of those properties is a long way from a confirmed thing.

As Disney+ gets ready to go and Disney takes on Netflix head-on, they're trying to put their best foot forward and develop content for that too tied to the MCU, including:

• A Loki show
• A Hawkeye show (with an apprentice or squire or whatever you want to call her, in training)
• WandaVision, with Scarlet Witch and the Vision (how does Vision come back, anyway? He didn't in Endgame.)
• A Falcon and Winter Soldier show.  Maybe that's the way to actually develop Falcon in a venue where he could possibly have some success.

Of course, some of this assumes Disney actually knows how to create good content, and given the fiascos with LucasFilm in recent years, some recent scares with the MCU, and the generally dismal performance of MCU-tied TV shows in general, that may well be giving them too much credit.

Overall, it's fair to say that I'm fairly bearish on the prospects of the MCU.  I think it peaked this last weekend, and that it's decline and shrinkage will be both marked and rapid, as will be its turn towards radical anti-white, anti-male wokeness.  Which, of course, will only hasten it's decline even more.

The REAL Captain Marvel

Although few remember this today unless they're really into Golden Age comic book nerd-dom, but Captain Marvel was actually created by Fawcett Comics (which has been closed for decades) and was the most popular superhero comic throughout the 40s... and is the character that we now mostly know as Shazam.  Shazam itself was an acronym that described his powers:

The wisdom of Solomon
The strength of Hercules
The stamina of Atlas
The power of Zeus
The invulnerability of Achilles
The speed of Mercury

Which gives him most of the abilities that Superman later picked up, back in an era when, if you recall, Superman was "faster than a speeding bullet, more powerful than a locomotive, able to leap tall buildings in a single bound." (Although Captain Marvel originally couldn't fly either, he picked up that ability fairly quickly.)  Fawcett eventually succumbed to dirty politics and lawfare when DC sued them for copying Superman (probably they are scenes a faire, but the court battle is notable as one of the longest court battles in comic book history.)  Somehow while all of that was happening, Marvel trademarked the name, although they applied it to a totally different character (of course).  DC later ended up with ownership of the Fawcett characters, they couldn't even use his name, so they went back to the acronym of the wizard who granted him his powers and used that as an alternative name.

This Captain Marvel is notable for, among other things, outselling Superman, but also being the first superhero adapted to the screen, in the Republic Serial during the 40s named after him.  Thus, it's quite interesting that the movie Shazam! comes so closely on the heels of Captain Marvel, when he's really the character who by rights should have that name, not Carol Danvers.  How do the two movies compare?

First off, let me just point something out.  Zachary Levi—despite his stage name, which drops his real last name of Pugh—and despite his general appearance, is the descendant European not Jewish ancestry, and his last name is Welsh.  You probably remember him from Chuck and as the voice of Flynn Rider in Tangled, and if you haven't seen him recently, you probably thought of him as a kind of lanky nerdy looking dude.  He's not.  He put a ton of work into looking the part of Captain Marvel, and he's freakin' enormous.  Brie Larceny, on the other hand, is such an entitled little whiny princess that she just showed up, can't look the part, and had to get a butt double hired (squats are a girls' best friend.)

That vibe really describes the differences in the job that everyone involved with each movie did.  The produces, actors and writers of Shazam! worked to entertain you.  They worked hard and did a good job.  The producers, actors (with some exceptions, notably Jude Law, Ben Mendelson and Samuel Jackson) and especially writers of Captain Marvel just showed up all entitled and expected you to be entertained just because.  Billy Batson/Captain Marvel was a character who showed more depth in a single scene with his real mother than Carol Danvers/Captain Marvel was able to pull together during the entire two and a half or so hour runtime of her movie.  She was flat (and not just physically in the backside), uninteresting and unlikeable.  Billy Batson, played by a teenaged boy and Zachary Levi when in superpowered mode, was charming, funny, relatable and very fun.

Sigh.  Marvel continues to slide while DC is finally getting its act together with several good movies now in recent years; this one, Aquaman and Wonder Woman.  Mostly because they're actually trying to be good movies that entertain the audience and make them glad they came, whereas Marvel is not only coasting, but also starting to get into the kind of preachiness that is death to entertainment.

Now, don't get me wrong, Captain Marvel isn't totally unredeemable, even though the main character, the plot, and the actress herself were.  The space opera stuff, when it did that, was pretty cool.  Jude Law and Ben Mendelsson in particular, turned in great performances that I quite enjoyed.  But I absolutely will not buy this movie, or watch it again under, I can't imagine, any circumstances at all.  Shazam! on the other hand, I really liked a lot.  I'll probably buy it on blu-ray, and I'll certainly go out of my way to watch it again.

The worst thing about the Captain Marvel debacle is that it suggests the possibility that Marvel is going to majorly drop the ball with Endgame...

Brie Larceny

https://boundingintocomics.com/2019/03/13/new-reports-of-empty-theaters-at-captain-marvel-add-to-movies-controversy/

Disney lying to us about the success of Captain Marvel.

Not shocked.

Monday Morning Grab-Bag: Captain Marvel and Bell Beakers

Well, in spite of the fact that I didn't really want to, my wife wanted to go see Captain Marvel this Friday, and I told her that if she bought tickets, I'd go.  We also ended up taking my youngest son, who's 15 going on 25, so we put more money in Disney's coffers than I would have liked (it was my intention to watch it sometime this week at matinee prices.

It seems like it hardly matters, I suppose.  Captain Marvel did pretty big business this weekend, opening to more than $150 million (although I sometimes wonder with how early they project a weekend take if a lot of it isn't fudged.  They can also game the numbers somewhat by adding more theaters, which they certainly did in this case.)  The critical reviews at Rotten Tomatoes are at 80% after dipping briefly to 79% (I guess they found another review or two that they could dubiously call positive that were added to the total.)  After purging almost 60,000 user reviews, they've managed to get the user score up to 58% (with about 63,000 scores.)  The more trustworthy Metacritic has critics score at 64 out of 100 and a user score of 3.3 out of 10.  Of course, more trustworthy means merely that it more accurately reports what the users and critics have said, not that the users and critics are themselves trustworthy.  By funny coincidence, I think Rotten Tomatoes user score is and the metacritic critics score, which are relatively close to each other might be the more accurate reflection of what people really thought of the quality of the movie.  My wife and son said the movie was in the 60s and they liked it.  I said it was in the 40s and I didn't very much, although I certainly admit it wasn't a complete failure on all fronts.  My wife and son do tend to be easily pleased with movies and not very critical, for whatever that's worth.

I had earlier thought that the movie was going to be mediocre, but not actively bad—much like Black Panther, actually.  There'd be some passive aggressive digs on the cultural war front, but it wouldn't be a raging "I hate white males" movie (even if the actress and producers do, in fact, hate white males, which I think is pretty obvious from their racist, sexist and altogether inappropriate and foolish public behavior the last several weeks.)  I figured it likely that Carol Danvers would be a Mary Sue, and that at the end of the movie, once she figured out that "the patriarchy" or whatever was holding her back, she'd suddenly become invincible, boringly overpowered, and the conclusion to the movie would fall flat.  I also predicted that French Cheese Larson would be a charmless and unlikable lead.  So, like Justice League except with even more unlikable characters than that movie managed.

But then, as the controversy intensified last week and critics reviews were much more muted in their praise than I expected, and early user reviews were much worse than I expected, I started to convince myself that the movie really was going to be actively and aggressively bad.  I don't know honestly if I'm glad or not to report that it's not actively and aggressively bad, just kinda passively and lazily bad.  It's not The Last Jedi of Marvel Films, it's The Force Awakens, in more ways than one.  In fact, my earlier predictions were almost exactly correct in every detail.  I was left telling myself that I told you so, which is kind of awkward and weird, if you really think about it.  I smirked a few times at a few jokes, although it wasn't up to the normal Marvel comedy.  I thought Talos the leader of the Skrull guys, played by Ben Mendelsohn, was excellent.  Jude Law as Kree strike team leader Yon-Rogg was also excellent, and Sam Jackson as young Nick Fury was... surprisingly underused and oddly put in a kind of ridiculous Stepin Fetchit role, which should be kind of embarrassing to everyone.  Although, other than that, he at least has plenty of on-screen charisma, so there's that.  I actually really like the Marvel Space stuff, and they've done a pretty good job with it.  In fact, I'd suggest that that's the best aspect of this movie altogether, and that... I dunno.  It doesn't save it exactly, but it does give you a reason to go see it other than the fact that it makes it quite obvious that they're going to do some kind of BS Captain Marvel Mary Sue to drop the ball in Avengers Endgame, and all of those years of watching Marvel movies is likely going to feel like it ended on a major let-down.

Sigh.

In actually more exciting news, at least to me, I found this interesting PCA of some Bell Beakers genetic samples compared to some other samples of other interesting characters, including some modern populations.  What does it show us?  Well, first of all, Bell Beaker almost perfectly coincides with Germanic and very nearly does with Irish and French too.  There's also a very close (overlapping even) similarity between Bell Beakers and Czech and German Corded Ware.  There's also some overlap between them on one edge and the Germany Bronze Age, although that tends to tail out away from the Bell Beaker cluster, overlapping almost exactly with some of the Finno-Ugric and most of the Slavic samples.  Baltic and Slavic, by the way, are in the midpoint of a line that you can draw between the Bell Beaker cluster and the Baltic Bronze Age and late Corded Ware.  Some of the Finno-Ugric fits in there too; Finno-Ugric actually has quite a wide spread.  It seems to be the language family that genetically doesn't have a very strong signal; it tends to resemble it's neighbors quite closely.  Although curiously, the Yamnaya samples are at a midpoint between the Bell Beakers and the Finno-Ugric cluster that isn't on the same cline as the rest of the Indo-European population, which is quite curious.  The Ukraine Eneolithic is in this Yamnaya cluster (which is not surprising at all) as is Early Baltic Corded Ware.

However, if you look at a few more details, some other interesting texture starts to come out.  The Bell Beakers do not cluster right with the Yamnaya or the Ukraine Eneolithic, and are closer to the Czech and German Corded Ware (which bridge the two, overlapping a bit with Beakers).  The former two, however, are the same Y-DNA haplogroup as the most common in the Bell Beakers, and the Corded Ware is not.  This is quite curious, and has bedazzled many observers, who note the Y-haplogroup and ignore the PCA.  I'm not quite sure what to make of it, or how to interpret it.  Whether it means that later arriving dominant male Beaker people took an awful lot of Corded Ware wives or something is unclear, but clearly the R1a-M417 rich Corded Ware Y-haplogroups are still common in Scandinavia and the rest of the North Sea coast; they make up a significant portion of Germanic populations today (or rather, their descendant clades do) as well as modern Baltic and Slavic populations.  The Indo-Iranian languages also seem to primarily feature a descendant clade of this same R1a-M417 (the Z93).  This suggests that regardless of what interactions later Yamnaya had on Europe itself, that the Corded Ware horizon is still mostly responsible for most of the extant Indo-European languages; Indo-Iranian, Balto-Slavic, Germanic and Celtic (at least modern Celtic) and probably Italic all come from a population that is mostly Corded Ware in its formation, with various levels of admixture.

The Paleo-Balkan languages seem to be the exception (and their likely descendants like Greek and Armenian), as do the Tocharian languages, which come from R1b-rich Yamnaya-derived populations without the R1a-rich Corded Ware layer.  But that's it.

I'm still unclear on the actual steppe pre-spread interactions between the R1a and R1b haplogroups and why Yamnaya and Corded Ware differ so much from each other (and what in the Corded Ware "pulled" them away from Yamnaya; presumably a substrate of Narva and TRB guys.  I'm also still very unclear where Baden and GAC fit, but they were probably remnants of an earlier pre-Indo-European population that remained for a time near to the Corded Ware horizon. GAC may even be intrusive from the west, although it looks like they died off without much issue (no doubt later Central European populations have some admixture, but not nearly as much as you'd think.) They're not on this PCA, but I've seen others that suggest that they are a cline of EEF and WHG or SHG and have very little if any steppe admixture.

And it still doesn't really answer the question of who the Bell Beakers are and where they came from.  It's clear that the later Unetice culture is genetically descended directly from the Beakerfolk, and that (most likely) the Celtic, Germanic and Italic language families all come from people who lived in the Unetice culture, and the aristocracy at least, if not in fact most of the people, who later emerged in those culturo-linguistic groups, are direct descendants therefore of the Bell Beakers.  And it seems like a big portion of the Bell Beakers were, in fact, Corded Ware peoples who suddenly became very cosmopolitan about 2,800 BC, went all over Europe, spread their language, culture and genetics with them, but did admix a bit with the locals; they didn't just wipe them out and replace them.  So they were almost certainly predominantly late Western Indo-European at some stage earlier than the division into those three language stocks specifically, and may well have included many people who belonged to other Indo-European language stocks or even other language families altogether, especially wives who were probably taken in Männerbund raids, which explains their diversity of geography and genetics to a great degree.

But those are pretty vague and handwavy conclusions, and I wish more detail were really understood.  The Bell Beakers remain one of the most mysterious, and yet one of the most important historical peoples to have ever lived in Europe, and are an early example of my own ancestors at a certain stage of development.

Disney WANTS to destroy Marvel and Star Wars

At least, if you accept that model, their behavior makes more sense.  Quoting the following article, with comments of my own:

I previously wrote how Brie Larson is a huge gamble for Disney and Kevin Feige - especially following the failure of Star Wars: The Last Jedi - and now the Captain Marvel movie looks to be in big, big trouble, unfortunately. 

Back in January, following the NCAA trailer, it was reported that Captain Marvel was projected to have a massive $160 million opening weekend with some estimates even offering $180 million. 

However, the bad news for Kevin Feige and Captain Marvel is that those projections have now dropped upwards of $80 million, as it is reported the flick may only open around $100 million. 

The latest projections come from Deadline, with the site offering Captain Marvel will now open in line with other Marvel origin films, but won't come anywhere near Black Panther's $202 million. Interestingly enough, further evidence Captain Marvel is not as highly regarded among fans comes from the fact that Black Panther supporters have not supported the Captain Marvel gofundme to get girls to go see the movie.

Wait; what?  Marvel is creating a gofundme to get people to see their movie?  What in the world?

The main reason Brie Larson is a gamble is because she's uncharismatic and joyless.  To be fair, from what everyone is saying about her character in the actual comics lately, that describes her as well.  What nobody seems to understand is that women who act like fake men, who are uncharming, unpleasant to be around, and unfeminine, are not likable.  To anyone.  Girls don't like them.  Men don't like them.  Nobody likes them, and at an instinctual level, we understand that such semi-women are flawed and dysfunctional.  It's probably subconscious, and most people can't articulate why it's true, but most people at a bone-deep level understand, however, that it is.

I'm curious where these projections being tossed around above come from, but it should be obvious to anyone at all anywhere that Black Panther was an extraordinary opening.  It wasn't that great of a movie, but because it spoke to black identity, it got black people to see it in numbers that are unusually high.  Because of the dysfunctional nature of our society, it also got virtue-signaling white people to go see it like crazy, because they wanted to demonstrate how ... whatever, non-racial or something that they were to everyone in their life.  And then, the movie was only mediocre, and was based on tier 2 (at best) level characters—which means that they'll never be able to pull off that kind of thing ever again and have anywhere near the same financial results.

Did they think that they could recreate that same bizarre and unique perfect storm of events again except with feminist identity?  I dunno, but it kinda sounds like they did, yeah.

There is also a huge problem with Brie Larson who has been spinning Captain Marvel as a feminist movie, essentially isolating the audience, and she even recently came out against white males for some reason. I'm actually surprised and disappointed in Kevin Feige that he is allowing Larson to destroy the MCU audience, and that Disney and CEO Bob Iger haven't learned anything from Star Wars. It's never a good thing to split the audience or insult them. Do they not want white males to go see the movie?

No, not really.  I mean, they'll take their money, but one thing that Disney has signaled very loudly and very clearly is that they hate white males.  They hate white culture.  They hate white identity.  They hate, hate, hate, hate hate white people period.

Which is why the Left is always running around accusing the Right of hate, which confuses and demoralizes the Right, because the Right doesn't really hate anyone.  (Yet.)  With the Left, it's always projection.

And arrogance.  And a shocking lack of awareness.

THE WRATH OF THE AWAKENED SAXON
adapted from Rudyard Kipling

It was not part of their blood,
It came to them very late,
With long arrears to make good,
When the Saxon began to hate.

They were not easily moved,
They were icy -- willing to wait
Till every count should be proved,
Ere the Saxon began to hate.

Their voices were even and low.
Their eyes were level and straight.
There was neither sign nor show
When the Saxon began to hate.

It was not preached to the crowd.
It was not taught by the state.
No man spoke it aloud
When the Saxon began to hate.

It was not suddenly bred.
It will not swiftly abate.
Through the chilled years ahead,
When Time shall count from the date
That the Saxon began to hate.

But yeah; they won't and in fact probably can't stop doubling down.  The author of this article seems surprised and shocked and disappointed, but that's because he's slow to realize what's happening.  Those of us (like me) who have already seen the pattern and already know what's happening, (and in fact, at this point, can't unsee it everywhere we look—even when we want to just take a break from it) are not surprised, shocked or disappointed—because we already know what's happening and why.

As I have been tweeting and responding to fans, the storyline surrounding the character is also cause for concern - something Avengers: Endgame directors Joe and Anthony Russo have recently responded to - as the character's movie is not even out and already she is said to be this overpowerful character, the new face of the MCU, reason for the formation of the Avengers, new leader of the Avengers, etc. The same arguments apply to any male character as well, as Feige is retconning Captain Marvel as a be all end all character in the MCU, which is coming off as more and more ridiculous, especially as Larson does more and more interviews (with non-white males, because why - white males are bad?? Larson does realize her bosses are white males, right? Guess that didn't come into question when she signed her $5 million deal for Captain Marvel and her 7-picture MCU deal, right? Is Larson buying any young underprivileged girls tickets with that multi-million dollar contract??).

Just what Marvel needs; to create for itself a Superman problem.  One of the big advantages Marvel always had over DC was that it didn't have a Superman.  Yet now, they're trying to create one, except of course, that she has to be a grrl-power Superman.  When she makes every other character superfluous, the convergence of Marvel will be complete, and everyone will have lost interest in it.

In any case, no—Larson's bosses are not white males.  They are Jewish males.  Totally different.  She's probably doing exactly what they want her to.  With some few notable exceptions, Jews in America are probably tied with blacks for being the most unassimilatable population subgroup that lives here.  They simply don't become Americans.  They maintain themselves apart, and are openly hostile to traditional American cultural institutions, and want to hobble them when they can't openly destroy them.

But yeah; Larson herself, as well as the execs at Disney, all belong to the soi-dissant elite caste of "Americans" who's main point of identity is their hatred and contempt of America and any American institution.  They want nothing more than to grind white males beneath their heels.  Which is why pop culture has become an open lecture over and over again of hate propaganda against masculinity, Christianity, Americanism and whiteness.

Disney, Feige and Marvel Studios could be banking on having a zombie audience that will simply go see all their movies no matter what is said or how good they are; however, that scenario has been played out with the aforementioned Disney Star Wars movies and also Marvel Comics. As a result of The Last Jedi, Disney has put the movies on hiatus for what looks to be at least another two years (no movies are coming out after Episode IX that have been announced). Regarding Marvel Comics, the past seven years or so saw them insult fans and force characters onto fans - all shades of what is happening with Captain Marvel - which backfired big time for Disney as executives were fired and sales are dwindling (it's so bad that Disney's consumer products, which includes Star Wars and Marvel Comics, is the only division at the company to have reported a loss). So will the same happen with the MCU? Brie Larson and Captain Marvel are supposed to be the face of the MCU for five more movies following The Avengers: Endgame, what happens when fans turn their backs? The MCU goes on a hiatus?

Yes, probably.  Then again, Star Wars and comic books are the last descendants of various boy's adventure stories that epitomize being a white male.  So naturally this hostile over-caste of people who hate white males don't really want it to succeed.  They want to subvert it, but they aren't really all that bright, so they don't understand (or believe) that subverted Star Wars and subverted comic books will lose all of their appeal to any paying audience.  But their secondary goal to have destroyed something that white males value is worth it to them anyway.

UPDATE: I thought the following comment was pretty funny, by "Chief_Tuscaloosa_welcome_white_man":

Marketing (via Brie Larson) to potential girl audience: "Come see this movie with this girl who's prettier than you and stronger than you and invulnerable to you stabbing her in the back metaphorically via social media in order to have a better chance at getting Chad on the soccer team to like you."
.
Marketing (via Brie Larson) to potential boy audience: "Go screw yourself, white boys, I'm probably into purple crayons so keep your filthy money and see something else."
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Awaiting box office results of this one-two punch!