What can I say - sometimes I just can't let a good pun go to waste.
REVIEW: Mad Max: Fury Road (2015)
For the first time in a long time, I feel like I’ve been derelict in my duties as a Generation X film geek. Oh sure, me and my kind have done a fine job making sure that STAR WARS, RAIDERS, GOONIES, EVIL DEAD, RAMBO the collective John Carpenter and even fucking TRON remained at the ubiquitous forefront of pop-culture to such a degree that our Millennial ascendants couldn’t have avoided absorbing their supposed import if they wanted to… but I now realize we kinda forgot to tell you how great the MAD MAX movies were. Which means a lot of my audience probably only knows legendary Australian filmmaker George Miller as the guy behind… eh, well, a string a beloved childhood classics – but still! He did also invent the post-apocalyptic automotive warfare movie.
So… sorry about that, but in our defense the guy who played “Mad Max” went all cuckoo for Christ and then just plain cuckoo and everything he was associated with got kinda uncomfortable to talk about. But whatever! Now Tom Hardy is playing Mad Max, so it’s all good again.
If you’ve never seen a MAD MAX movie before… well, it’s the future, we’ve almost run out of oil but instead of being in any way responsible about that we’ve basically let the entire planet go to shit except for all the gas-guzzling jacked-up cars on which we now rely more than ever and… egh, look, back in the 80s this sounded like ca-raaazy Science Fiction instead of an eventuality potentially only ONE more Bush Administration away.
But whatever! We rejoin mentally-unhinged wasteland-wandering hardcase Max Rockatansky doing what he does best: Getting swept up into chaotic events he wants no part of but can’t bring himself to abandon. As the film opens, he’s captured to be used as a human bloodbank for a heavily-armed death cult led by the bizarre tyrant Immorten Joe. But no sooner does Max get there than all-out war breaks out when Joe’s general Imperator Furiosa is revealed to have helped The Immorten’s private harem of breeding wives escape to the open road; triggering an extended (and I do mean across the entire length of the film) combat car-chase – with Max finding himself reluctantly joining Furiosa’s quest and helping her fend off the three or four maniacal factions pursuing them across the desert.
Yeah. That’s pretty much the movie: The good guys are driving a truckload of hotties across the apocalyptic outback, Death Metal Darth Vader and his skinhead-tweaker suicide army want them back, and they all chase eachother around in crazy customized battle-cars wailing on eachother with insane weapons and nature occasionally intervening in the form of a death-trap marsh and a sandstorm lightning-hurricane. The result is an action film the likes of which you’ve largely never seen before, a seamless fusion of the old-fashioned gritty lunacy Miller made famous in the original films and cutting-edge 21st Century digital technology and editing techniques that looks even better in the hands of a seasoned master – action filmmaking that blows by so fast and so confidently you almost don’t realize how hard it hits until a bit later; when the real depth beneath its deceptive simplicitly of storytelling.
It’s a conceit of both prior sequels in the franchise that Max is a charismatic candide-like figure who stumbles into other people’s adventures, but in FURY ROAD it’s more apparent than ever: This is very much Furiosa’s movie – she takes all the initiative, drives all the plot, has all the skin in the game, she even gets to drive the big main battle-truck and have the cool robot arm! Max spends most of the first hour with his mouth muzzled so he can barely speak, and even once he’s free he doesn’t talk all that much. This isn’t one of those movies where the title character is the only person on Earth who can save us all because the movie says so – he’s capable and good to have around (and, for the record, Hardy is a commanding enough presence as to make you forget the role was ever recast), but you get the sense Furiosa would’ve worked this one out okay enough on her own.
Theron proved herself a fearlessly great actress a long time ago, but Furiosa is a revelation – there likely won’t be a more strikingly original hero onscreen this year. Attention also needs to be paid to a revelatory strong turn by a commanding Rosie Huntington-Whitely, and a nuanced showing from Nicholas Hoult as a luckless would-be foot-soldier whose arc forms the philosophical spine of the story – and yes, I said philosophical!
While the subsequent-superstardom of Mel Gibson and the endlessly ripped-off popularity of the wacky custom cars have been the most enduring elements of the original MAD MAX movies, Miller’s *truly* fascinating conceit was imagining what a future of newly re-barbarianized humanity trying to assemble new cultures and civilizations out of the half-remembered remains of our own might look like. This time, though, there’s actually a big, loud, radical point being made; in a manner that would probably seem overly blunt and on the nose but feels downright subtle in a movie where one of Immorten Joe’s war rigs comes with an array of speakers and a guy with a flame-throwing guitar strapped to it like a human hood-ornament because why wouldn’t he have one of those?
See, Furiosa isn’t simply helping The Immorten’s wives get away from HIM, she’s helping them escape to her own homeland – a far-flung Matriarchy reigned over by grandmotherly Amazonian motorcyclists who follow a gentle path of nurture and nature-cultivation (but, y’know, with sniper-rifles and dirtbikes because this is a MAD MAX movie) where they hope to raise their offspring as anything BUT warlords, under a philosophical rallying cry of “Who killed the world?” asked in a way that leaves no doubt as to what the answer is. By contrast, the obscenely evil Immorten Joe rules over his subjects by way of a self-conjured religion comprised of equal parts car-culture, gun-worship, repurposed Viking mythology other and uber-masculine “honor culture” staples that’s yielded (among other things) an army of Skinhead suicide-soldiers called “Warboys” eager to die in battle for their surrogate daddy’s approval.
Yes, this time it’s a battle for the future course of human civilization, with the heavy implication that it’s stern father-figure patriarchs like Immorten Joe that got the world into this mess while Furiosa’s Amazon naturalists represent hope and progress. These are the kind of weighty ruminations you don’t generally expect from movies where flame-thrower guitarists are part of the set decoration.
Bottom line: This time, you can believe the hype. MAD MAX: FURY ROAD is one of the most brutal, bone-crunching action films recent memory, one of the boldest most original visual experiences of the year and – improbably – one of the smartest works of dystopian scifi to emerge from the current deluge. I know the film critic collective has overhyped this sucker to kingdom come, but… seriously, just go see it anyway – it kicks ass.
So… sorry about that, but in our defense the guy who played “Mad Max” went all cuckoo for Christ and then just plain cuckoo and everything he was associated with got kinda uncomfortable to talk about. But whatever! Now Tom Hardy is playing Mad Max, so it’s all good again.
If you’ve never seen a MAD MAX movie before… well, it’s the future, we’ve almost run out of oil but instead of being in any way responsible about that we’ve basically let the entire planet go to shit except for all the gas-guzzling jacked-up cars on which we now rely more than ever and… egh, look, back in the 80s this sounded like ca-raaazy Science Fiction instead of an eventuality potentially only ONE more Bush Administration away.
But whatever! We rejoin mentally-unhinged wasteland-wandering hardcase Max Rockatansky doing what he does best: Getting swept up into chaotic events he wants no part of but can’t bring himself to abandon. As the film opens, he’s captured to be used as a human bloodbank for a heavily-armed death cult led by the bizarre tyrant Immorten Joe. But no sooner does Max get there than all-out war breaks out when Joe’s general Imperator Furiosa is revealed to have helped The Immorten’s private harem of breeding wives escape to the open road; triggering an extended (and I do mean across the entire length of the film) combat car-chase – with Max finding himself reluctantly joining Furiosa’s quest and helping her fend off the three or four maniacal factions pursuing them across the desert.
Yeah. That’s pretty much the movie: The good guys are driving a truckload of hotties across the apocalyptic outback, Death Metal Darth Vader and his skinhead-tweaker suicide army want them back, and they all chase eachother around in crazy customized battle-cars wailing on eachother with insane weapons and nature occasionally intervening in the form of a death-trap marsh and a sandstorm lightning-hurricane. The result is an action film the likes of which you’ve largely never seen before, a seamless fusion of the old-fashioned gritty lunacy Miller made famous in the original films and cutting-edge 21st Century digital technology and editing techniques that looks even better in the hands of a seasoned master – action filmmaking that blows by so fast and so confidently you almost don’t realize how hard it hits until a bit later; when the real depth beneath its deceptive simplicitly of storytelling.
It’s a conceit of both prior sequels in the franchise that Max is a charismatic candide-like figure who stumbles into other people’s adventures, but in FURY ROAD it’s more apparent than ever: This is very much Furiosa’s movie – she takes all the initiative, drives all the plot, has all the skin in the game, she even gets to drive the big main battle-truck and have the cool robot arm! Max spends most of the first hour with his mouth muzzled so he can barely speak, and even once he’s free he doesn’t talk all that much. This isn’t one of those movies where the title character is the only person on Earth who can save us all because the movie says so – he’s capable and good to have around (and, for the record, Hardy is a commanding enough presence as to make you forget the role was ever recast), but you get the sense Furiosa would’ve worked this one out okay enough on her own.
Theron proved herself a fearlessly great actress a long time ago, but Furiosa is a revelation – there likely won’t be a more strikingly original hero onscreen this year. Attention also needs to be paid to a revelatory strong turn by a commanding Rosie Huntington-Whitely, and a nuanced showing from Nicholas Hoult as a luckless would-be foot-soldier whose arc forms the philosophical spine of the story – and yes, I said philosophical!
While the subsequent-superstardom of Mel Gibson and the endlessly ripped-off popularity of the wacky custom cars have been the most enduring elements of the original MAD MAX movies, Miller’s *truly* fascinating conceit was imagining what a future of newly re-barbarianized humanity trying to assemble new cultures and civilizations out of the half-remembered remains of our own might look like. This time, though, there’s actually a big, loud, radical point being made; in a manner that would probably seem overly blunt and on the nose but feels downright subtle in a movie where one of Immorten Joe’s war rigs comes with an array of speakers and a guy with a flame-throwing guitar strapped to it like a human hood-ornament because why wouldn’t he have one of those?
See, Furiosa isn’t simply helping The Immorten’s wives get away from HIM, she’s helping them escape to her own homeland – a far-flung Matriarchy reigned over by grandmotherly Amazonian motorcyclists who follow a gentle path of nurture and nature-cultivation (but, y’know, with sniper-rifles and dirtbikes because this is a MAD MAX movie) where they hope to raise their offspring as anything BUT warlords, under a philosophical rallying cry of “Who killed the world?” asked in a way that leaves no doubt as to what the answer is. By contrast, the obscenely evil Immorten Joe rules over his subjects by way of a self-conjured religion comprised of equal parts car-culture, gun-worship, repurposed Viking mythology other and uber-masculine “honor culture” staples that’s yielded (among other things) an army of Skinhead suicide-soldiers called “Warboys” eager to die in battle for their surrogate daddy’s approval.
Yes, this time it’s a battle for the future course of human civilization, with the heavy implication that it’s stern father-figure patriarchs like Immorten Joe that got the world into this mess while Furiosa’s Amazon naturalists represent hope and progress. These are the kind of weighty ruminations you don’t generally expect from movies where flame-thrower guitarists are part of the set decoration.
Bottom line: This time, you can believe the hype. MAD MAX: FURY ROAD is one of the most brutal, bone-crunching action films recent memory, one of the boldest most original visual experiences of the year and – improbably – one of the smartest works of dystopian scifi to emerge from the current deluge. I know the film critic collective has overhyped this sucker to kingdom come, but… seriously, just go see it anyway – it kicks ass.
TV Recap: AGENTS OF S.H.I.E.L.D - Season 2 Episode 21-22: "S.O.S."
NOTE: This recap brought to you in part by The MovieBob Patreon.
Guys... I've got feelings. So many feelings.
AGENTS OF S.H.I.E.L.D apparently did well enough in its second season to earn a third, but I feel like the news of just how good the show has gotten (within the realm of a medium-camp network sci-fi/action series, at least) has been a phenomenon centered mainly around TV writers and Marvel die-hards than general tube-junkies. My hope is that, now that Season 2 has concluded, the binge-watch set will discover it - and not just because the reveal of... the stuff I'm still electing to keep for after the jump has made it mandatory viewing (or, at least, mandatory wiki-ing) for Marvel Cinematic Universe completists.
No, I'd rather people "discover" that AGENTS got really good in Season 2 because it's now a damn solid bit of television; with memorable characters and a twisty "anything goes yet somehow adheres to an internal logic" ongoing story that in some ways makes better use of being in The Marvel Cinematic Universe than the more prestigious movies do - where AGE OF ULTRON occasionally seemed to be quietly resentful of its brief detours for people/places set to pay off in future movies, S.H.I.E.L.D seems to relish the prospect of pit stops involving aliens, Asgardians, HYDRA, mad scientists etc. Season 2 was full of moments where the series (as personified by Clark Gregg's Director Coulson) seemed barely able to contain shouting <b>"Look at all this STUFF we get to play with!!!"</b>
And yet, it also managed (with a few exceptions) to be a more serious, dramatic series than anything with so much built-in silliness really had any right to be; ironically excelling in many key areas where folks have (rightly) found the movie side of the Marvel experiment lacking: AGENTS OF S.H.I.E.L.D runs on complex character dynamics, features an embarassment of riches in terms of diversity and strong female characters in particular and has the television-specific luxury of being able to chill out and let a character-arc breathe across multiple episodes. Yes, fine, DAREDEVIL (and Vincent D'onofrio's Kingpin in particular) was "the story" of Marvel on TV this year, but AGENTS turning itself into something vital deserves to be part of that discussion as well.
Anyway, onto "S.O.S." and SPOILERS...
Among Season 2's many impressive features has been the way it's handled huge changes to characters and relationships (by my count the "status quo" was upended at least 3-5 times over 22 episodes) mainly by stating "this is what's going on now" and relying on the actors to sell it. AGENTS OF S.H.I.E.L.D is an FX-heavy production, but when it came to "shit just got real" moments it was all about delivery. Nowhere was that more apparent than the way it hid its cards on who/what would actually be the big existential threat of the finale - largely by relying on audiences to assume "No they wouldn't" in regards to Jaiying, aka "Skye's Mom."
For as long as we knew she existed, Jaiying was presented as Season 2's martyr-in-chief: Her (non)-existence as a tangible person finally made Skye's "little girl lost" persona stick, helped us understand Cal/Mr. Hyde as well as could be expected, and our main source for regarding first-half fake-out villain Daniel Whitehall as evil incarnate was the knowledge that he'd butchered her alive to attain immortality. If Skye (aka "Daisy") is AGENTS' " chosen one/redeemer figure, then Jaiying has effectively been its Virgin Mary.
So to have her turn out to not only be the season's surprise Big Bad but in many ways the reigning Big Bad of the series' "lore" so far (in as much as she ordered Cal to become Mr. Hyde, making her the leader of the "Two Monsters" whom Skye's faked-orphan backstory was designed to protect her from) and have it both make since and feel right over the course of only three episodes (this being a two-parter) is good writing and good acting, no magic trick - though the reveal that she's not "immortal" but actually has to drain life from others (it used to be done through elective self-sacrifice by Inhuman elders, now she's more-or-less a vampire) feels like it maybe could've been tipped a bit earlier.
It also serves to make her (and to a lesser extent Cal) two of the darkest villains Marvel has concocted of late: here's two decent, damn near saint-like people (the protector/nurturer of an entire culture and a Doctors Without Borders volunteer for crissakes!) who have something unimaginably evil done to them entirely unjustly. Near-miraculously, he manages to bring her back from the brink... but the damage is done, the experience has broken her mind/soul permanently and she's evil now - strongarming him into becoming evil, too. And there's no fixing her, no coming back, no switch to flip back to "good" because some scars don't heal. No justice, no cosmic balancing-out, no way out but for Cal having been . That's fucking DARK.
The rest of the show? Pretty good, too.
The Inhumans are getting introduced here, 4-5 years in advance of their self-titled movie, because Marvel needs them to replace The X-Men and that's a lot of audience-familiarity time to make up. <i>"S.O.S."</i> is, clearly, meant to serve as a test-run for how that's going to work: It's straight-up, no-bullshit an X-Men story without the X-Men; with a small community of
Does it work? Hell yeah. Everything involving the raid on The Icarus was awesome (good fight scenes, good action, good tension, nice mix of powers and characters) in the exact same way that the best X-Men versions of the same scenario are. It's a bummer that Wolverine etc won't even scrap with The Avengers, and I think it's pretty lame that Marvel is poised to send the comic-book X-Men packing just to fuck with Fox, sure. But if the question is "can Marvel Studios tell good 'superheroes-as-metaphor-for-racial/cultural-discord' stories using The Inhumans?" then the answer is yes - especially since, if this stuff works within AGENTS OF S.H.I.E.L.D's modest means, it'll likely look gangbusters up onscreen.
For a minute there I wasn't fully sold on the turnaround with Cal, and I still sort-of wish his full "Mr. Hyde" form was a little more Hulk and a little less Unfrozen Caveman Lawyer. But Season 2 MVP Kyle MacLachlan is just so goddamn fun in the part he sold it anyway and (intentional or not) the low-tech "strong monster guy" staging had pleasing echoes of the old HULK show (holy shit, why haven't they found an excuse for Lou Ferrigno to be on this show yet!?) I'm not sure that Coulson being able to talk him down into switching sides for Skye's sake makes a lot of sense, but MacLachlan's big hyperemotive constant-breakdown overracting sold it - oldschool Universal Monsters "wailing/gnashing bad guy" stuff. Shit, he's good enough that his "happy" ending even feels earned... I let out an audible "Aw, geez..." when he dropped the "magical place" line, revealing what had to be done to "free" him. Ouch.
Another "one take" fight scene for Skye? Okay, cool. Bennett is more convincing using guns or her whooshy earthquake powers than the hand-to-hand stuff, but it's fun and keeps us rooting for the character. The big final confrontation between Skye, Jaiying and Cal forced her to act against two of the most capable performers on the show (playing characters who're allowed to be much more broadly-interpreted) and she held her own admirably. In a way, "coming out" as Inhuman has made Skye more relatable - Bennett (and the writers, to be fair) never quite found the comfortable spot between "unsure neophyte" and "scary-efficient computer genius;" but having been reborn as a Marvel Speciality "superhero as metaphor for young-person in life-transition?" NOW she makes a lot more sense.
As ever, going back to a Ward subplot is where the episode suffered. There's too much going on with too high of stakes for Bobbi/Hunter vs Ward/Agent 33 to be worth pulling our focus, and it's painfully obvious that this is only happening to set up the MOCKINGBIRD spin-off that's no longer going forward. Granted, the meat of it was solid (great double turnaround on the torture stuff, clever subversion of the "girl tied to a chair" routine, LOVED May's nasty-as-hell gotcha to 33) and it's not like the Marvel movies don't frequently overcome distracting detours into setups for other things, but it felt somewhat pointless and having him elect himself leader of "HYDRA, but as a street gang" is not going to be enough to fix Ward's not-in-any-way-interesting problem.
And hey, how about finally letting Mack do some action stuff? Him, Coulson and Fitz's fight with Gordon was a great action beat in a finale that had many.
And then there's Coulson's story...
The other thing <i>"S.O.S"</i> crystallizes about why Season 2 worked is the way the series finally settled in to having it's cake and eating it regarding how it "works" in its own universe. The season had a lot of mysteries, but really only one question: Is Coulson, now Director of S.H.I.E.L.D 2.0 by Nick Fury's hand, actually a good leader? Even before Gonzales and "real S.H.I.E.L.D" turned up, this was the question because of the Alien Writing situation.
The logical/rational answer, of course, is NO he absolutely isn't. He's overly emotional, he plays favorites and follows personal biases/hangups, he's inquisitive about "cool" or nostalgiac things to the point of recklessness and he wants to run a paramilitary/spy organization like a family camping trip. He's the last person who should be the guiding hand of a TV procedural drama, wherein problems are invariably solved through logic and rationality. But other procedural dramas aren't set in the Marvel Universe, and Coulson's eccentricities generally make perfect sense if you're living in a comic-book. Which everyone on this show basically is. Coulson's repeating-arc throughout Season 2 has been about his Fanboy Logic ("Super-powers are awesome!" "We need to chase down this alien stuff!" "Let's upgrade Deathlok!" "Maybe we can flip this villain to work for us!"), framed as pure and noble, coming up against "real" logic... and coming out on top. Pandering? Little bit, but it works.
As such, it makes "Marvel sense" for him to come out of all this minus an arm (no, I don't think they'll have him commission one from Iron Man) but otherwise still in charge of both S.H.I.E.L.D and a new initiative to draft a "covert" version of The Avengers from the world's population of powered-people (one imagines that this is where a lot of Season 3's story is going to come from, in tandem with Jaiying's counterfeit Terrigen material being dispersed into the ocean.) Curious to see who/what they pull from the canon to fill those slots - I imagine "newly-activated Inhuman" will be the shortform origin for some, but I don't think we'll hear from The Inhumans-plural again until things get closer to the movie. Big question, of course, becomes is THIS part of where CIVIL WAR will come from?
As for that final stinger? Eh... what can be said other than, "we'll see?" This makes two seasons in a row where they've seemingly taken unique pleasure in building up Fitz/Simmons shippers only to kick them in the gut at the last second. I doubt getting absorbed by the big stone whatsit has "killed" Simmons, and while I'm sure it's going to be the popular fan-theory... NO, I'd say there's a zero-percent chance that it's going to spit her back out as Captain Marvel. More likely? If The Inhumans were afraid of that thing, I could see her emerging with the ability (directly or indirectly) to hurt Inhumans specifically (maybe by neutralizing their powers?), maybe dredging back up her anti-superhuman leanings from earlier in the season? That would be an interesting wrinkle.
Overall, a great end to a good Season. Here's to hoping they can maintain this momentum heading into Season 3.
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Who's The Real Speed-Bump on FURY ROAD?
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The reviews are starting to hit for MAD MAX: FURY ROAD (I'm seeing it myself later today) and they're pretty-much over the moon among the big online-presence critics: Faraci likes it, Tapley like it, the links to Drew McWeeny's piece keep coming back broken but he's apparently onboard, McCarthy likes it, Kohn likes it, Duralde is into it and Chang digs it. But much of the ecstasy comes (at least on social media) tempered by a certain amount of bittnerness: Film Twitter has been convinced that this is The New Hotness all year, and now it's convinced that the film is going to "underperform" - in as much as action films generally need to open in first place now to be considered a "hit" by entertainment reporters, and FURY ROAD is tracking to open behind PITCH PERFECT 2 and maybe also (depending on who you ask) AVENGERS: AGE OF ULTRON in its third week.
The prospect of this makes me want to quit The Internet, my chosen vocation and the planet Earth for a month. Not because I'm going to be super-bummed about the film's success - my "investment" in MAD MAX is that I want George Miller to keep getting big director gigs and it's got cars and explosions, so it's going to tear shit up at the China/Pan-Asia boxoffice regardless what it does here - but I'm already pre-tired of hearing about what the "failure" (cultural, not necessarily financial) "means." An actioner equally beloved by "I remember REAL movies!" againg-boomer critics and Gen-X film-geek tastemakers eating it against a Girl Movie ("Eeeeeeew!") about pop-music ("EEEEEEEWWWW!!!!!") and the most-recent superhero entry? Welcome to Thinkpiece Hell. Yeech!
I almost want to play "movie journalism predictability bingo" with the results. Who's going to be first out of the gate with "REAL MEN are OVER at the boxoffice!"? How soon do we get the counter-clickbait "Real Men are OVER at the boxoffice - good riddance!"? Who'll be the champ of sniffing about arbitrary action-genre "cred" ("Pffff! Maybe they should've called it MARVEL'S Mad Max, eh?")? Screw Bingo, maybe it's time to invent Movie Critic Clue - I'll take Jeff Wells in The Starbucks with "Hispanic party-elephants."
Here's what I'd like to know: If and when FURY ROAD "fails" to leap whatever stupidly high bar has been set for an R-rated reboot of a franchise that sputtered out back in '85 and largely vanished under a sea of inferior knock-offs and endless present-era homages like DOOMSDAY (meanwhile, KINGSMEN, another "disappointment" has spun it's modest-but-steady boxoffice placing into becoming one of the year's biggest hits with a sequel on the way) and we're all looking for someone to blame, is anyone going to point the finger at the guy who's probably more responsible for this franchise not maintaining its once-thought garaunteed cultural capital...
...MEL GIBSON?
Let's not mince words: FURY ROAD's "glorious" marketing campaign isn't selling this movie to anyone who hasn't been onboard since the pitch. It has TRON LEGACY's trailers - zero plot (until Trailer #3), tons of mood and visuals, all hinged on "That you loved? It's back!!!!" Fine, fair enough, it IS a nostalgia-reboot property, after all, and that's big business right now. Want a likely big return? Sell Generation X it's pre-High School viewing years back to it - and invite everyone younger who's had to grow up with Gen-X tastemakers beating it into their skulls that This Stuff was The Best Stuff.
Except unlike STAR WARS, GHOSTBUSTERS, INDIANA JONES, ROCKY, RAMBO, STAR TREK, the Marvel canon, perennial "Give us a sequel!!!!" mainstays like GOONIES, MONSTER SQUAD, ESCAPE FROM NEW YORK, etc even BATMAN and SUPERMAN to a certain extent... the MAD MAX movies have not spent the last decade being re-enshrined, revisited and kept vital in the pop-consciousness. The dubious identifiers of what has and hasn't "lasted" (in no particular order: routines by pop-reference comedians, FAMILY GUY cutaway parodies, YouTube/meme fixations, Lego revivals) have largely ignored it. Right now, Mad Max as a franchise/character probably has less nostalgia/recieved-nostalgia cache going for it than EVIL DEAD/ARMY OF DARKNESS, which doesn't feel... right, if you remember how large it used to loom - and I sincerely think it's all-but entirely due to the fact that the character/franchise is inextricably tied to Mel Gibson - an actor who has effectively poisoned everything associated with him to a genuinely stunning degree.
Ever since Gibson effectively came out as "mean-spirited, self-torturing, kinda-sad crazy" instead of "fun crazy" as was his earlier reputation during the making and release of PASSION OF THE CHRIST, he's been on a cultural downward spiral that took most of his clout with it. PASSION's percieved (by many, including me) eye-popping anti-semitism made him an industry pariah, which in turn meant he had no "cover" when a whole mess of other scary/unpleasant stuff hit the headlines about him between '04 and recently. He's basically been a joke that quickly became to depressing to keep telling for a solid decade; and I doubt it's a coincidence that while damn near every other fragment of 80s pop-ephemera has gotten a reboot, a revival or at least endless positive reappraisal (do I need to remind you that Howard the Duck now counts as an applause-drawing cameo?) both MAD MAX and LETHAL WEAPON have been allowed to lie fallow?
Again, let's talk turkey: ROCKY and RAMBO both got to come back (Rocky is even coming back again for the new spin-off, CREED) not necessarily because they or their respective subgenres were particularly relevant at the time, but because the names Rocky Balboa and John J. Rambo had been burned into the pop-consciousness even of people who never saw the originals as Important Institutions in the intervening years. "Mad" Max Rockatansky hasn't had that luxury, his lot in the same amount of time has been: "Yeah, those were awesome. Too bad about Mel, huh?"
I hope the movie is good. It looks good. Hell, I'm cutting this a bit short so I can get on the train to go watch it. But if the now-expected "underperformance" (which really won't be, since it's rated R in May and this is 2015) happens, I wonder who else will look past slinging mud at PITCH PERFECT ("Fuckin' feminized American Idol-watching Tumblrina millennial brats!!!!") and/or geek-bloggers "in the tank" for the Marvel Machine ("Haw haw! Yeah, maybe we should tell the Nerd Herd there was a stinger about Max having the next one of those stupid rocks!") to ask if Mad Mel should take the lion's share of the lashings for kneecapping this franchise before it even ever got up to walk?
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IN BOB WE TRUST - "Widow's Peak"
Hm... something about this seems new, yet familiar...
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"The Marvel Industrial Complex," A Response
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So, this piece by James Rocchi, titled "The Marvel Industrial Complex," is the big film-writer discussion piece of the day; so it's incumbent that I weigh in on it even though my basic thoughts can be pretty handily summarized: I don't agree with a lot of the overall premise and think that a certain amount of misreading the text (re: the movies) is involved in a few too many of his conclusions, but Rocchi is a really sharp, smart guy and the piece is exceptionally well-argued - to the point that, while it's tempting to dismiss it out of hand as the same old "film critic rails against empty blockbusters" narrative re-skinned with a topical/clickable superhero theme (although it sort-of unavoidably is exactly that) it's just not proper to do so.
Anyway...
The thing that tends to stick with me about pieces like this is that, once they move on from the criticisms specific to the topic at hand (example: It's hard to argue that the demands of globalism requiring good/evil conflicts to be ever further removed from any relevant real-world context isn't creatively/narratively stifling, even for superhero movies) it all starts to descend into pointing out enduring truisms and insisting (against somewhat overwhelming evidence) that they are somehow "worse" in the present context, ergo:
YES, big-budget blockbuster movies tend to forego depth, texture and edge in their quest to appeal to the broadest possible audience... but somehow this fact that has existed since the Silent Era becomes exponentially worse because the broadly-sketched caricatures of Good and Evil are now wearing capes instead of cowboy hats (or badges, or pirate outfits, or whatever.)
YES, film writers who earn their clicks in the digital salt-mine by breathlessly publishing pieces about Infinity Stones and Continuity and whatever other easter-eggs Marvel peppers their films with (guilty) are effectively engaging in free marketing for the studios... but somehow this is MUCH more grievous a journalistic sin than handing studios free publicity by reporting on celebrity "news" (i.e. "What!? [Actress] said something provocative and headline-grabby? And it just happens to be the same week her new movie comes out!??") in decades past?
YES, for the pricetag of one AVENGERS: AGE OF ULTRON you could make a dozen romantic comedies, or workplace dramas, or important message-pieces; and the more studios are able to rely on big-ticket features the less inclined they'll be to spread the resources. That's a shame, but it's always been a shame. But the idea that if the "Marvel Boom" had never happened Hollywood would be spending it's money on less expensive, more nourishing (or, at least, more diversely-targeted) fare is ridiculous on its face - the money would simply be going to blockbusters just as big, just as bloated and just as "empty" but about different subjects, like scifi actioners (the 90s) buddy-cops (80s) natural disasters (70s) Biblical Tales (60s) or WWII (50s.)
Eventually, even the best-intentioned versions of this line of thinking transform into the film-genre version of white music journos railing against hip-hop amid its ascendence; wherein legitimate criticism/analysis would inevitably devolve into a stream of asinine assertions that the violence ("I shot a man in Reno...") misogyny ("Baby it's cold outside...") and winking nods to real-life criminality ("Jailhouse rock") in white popular-music was somehow less objectionable than the modern variations on the same coming out of Terrifying Young Black Men.
And while I don't know enough of Mr. Rocchi's background to even think about placing him decidedly in this particular camp, I can't help but be reminded in reading the piece again of similar dire contemplations by so many other critics; and in regards to those... well, I'm not someone who likes to armchair-diagnose the psyches of others, but in those cases (again, not necessarily including this current subject) it always ends up reading like personal resentment at professional alienation. Not saying it always is, just my read.
What I mean is, it's hard not to read takedown after takedown of this particular genre (and this particular studio - I have a sneaking suspicion that many critics are aching for an excuse to throw support behind the fandom-enraging but supposedly more "filmmaker driven" DC Universe movies) at this particular moment in time and not begin to ask if it really is about an ingrained bias against the genre; and while I don't think that's the general case I think it's part of the equation. The fact is, you can draw a direct line down the middle of all of professional film criticism (usually but not always generationally) between folks who, in addition to being cinephiles, also came up with the rest of the "geek ephemera" as part of their cultural development and those who... didn't.
Thusly, because it's so much easier for that first group to "engage" with what happens to be the overwhelmingly dominant genre/movement, that gives them a professional advantage that is often seen as unearned or unjust to the point of real, tangible resentment: "I can break down the aesthetic through-line of Lars Von Trier's entire post-Dogme95 output, but it won't draw 1/20th the traffic of some brat explaining whose giant dead head that was in the goddamn space raccoon movie!?" Of course you'd be pissed, why wouldn't you be pissed?
There's always a certain amount of resentment, especially in journalism and art, at generational "movements" sweeping their predecessors aside; but it really bubbles up hardcore when said generational movement can be easily viewed as one singular "other" - the aforementioned blacklash against the rise of hip-hop was very much "about" resentment at the idea of the "youth rebellion" music-mantle passing from white rockers to Black rappers. (And no, this doesn't mean anyone is being "called a racist" - take that back to Tumblr and express it through some FROZEN fan-art, please.)
Likewise, I think it's not out of line to suggest that the Marvel/comic/superhero backlash is coming at least in part from a place of resentment that the center of the Film Fandom universe has shifted from the repertory theater/coffee shop/cocktail bar to the comic book store/internet/social media world; that the "heat" in the business of film-writing is now mainly on a generational subset of folks whose connection to film and criticism began with the build-up to (and group-therapy come-down from) THE PHANTOM MENACE, got supercharged by the unprecedented web-news presence of the LORD OF THE RINGS, HARRY POTTER, SPIDER-MAN and X-MEN series in the early-00s and has now found them as vanguards of The New Mainstream in what I guess we have to call The Marvel Age of Movies. Rocchi's piece specifically namechecks Devin Faraci, who's damn near the poster child for this evolution: A guy who turned commenting on film-geek gossip forums into a paying gig and now operates the ultra-influential cinephile tastemaker site Birth.Movies.Death.
It's going to be interesting to see who "breaks" first here, the backlasher-critics or the thing they're backlashing at. A lot of the consternation about "superhero fatigue" (or lack thereof) is predicated on the idea (fear, occasionally) that the genre is self-sustaining and ending-proof: If Marvel releases ONE dud, three more are always still already in production and one of them is bound to hit and stop the "slippery slope talk." To a very real degree, Marvel's real genius has been to recognize that the media landscape of the present day allows the same content-publishing approach they built a comics empire on to be translated into movies and TV shows - and that comics empire lasted from the early-60s all the way into the mid-90s before it hit serious turbulence. On the other hand, Warner Bros is betting the farm on BATMAN V SUPERMAN being massive and beloved enough to spur interest in a second, competing superhero universe; but if audiences react to the film as unevenly as they've responded to it's marketing thus far... who knows? Could a failure that size be catastrophic enough to shake the whole industry out of it's comic-book love affair?
I get the sense that pretty soon you're going to see a concerted effort by "non geek" film press to simply ignore the genre outright, or at least to start treating the Marvel Universe productions the way it did James Bond movies for a good stretch; i.e. acknowledge that the built-in fanbase doesn't care what they think, that the series can really only be properly reviewed against its other entries (see also: ROCKY II - V) and only acknowledging when something otherwise noteworthy occurs within ("Oh! Marvel finally did their female-led movie!")
I'm not sure how feasible that is (the audience wants what it wants), and I also don't think it'd be for the best. It's certainly possible to be a film writer and not deal primarily with what's actually happening or relevant in the present of the medium, but the best and the brightest of "real" film journalism doesn't want to engage this genre in a deeper way (and I think that's what Rocchi's piece is sincerely trying to do, at least to begin with) on any level other than "This stuff isn't worth my time and why don't you care about how little I care!?" well, that's going to be a loss for the genre and for the writers.
Did you enjoy this piece? Please consider supporting The MovieBob Patreon!
So, this piece by James Rocchi, titled "The Marvel Industrial Complex," is the big film-writer discussion piece of the day; so it's incumbent that I weigh in on it even though my basic thoughts can be pretty handily summarized: I don't agree with a lot of the overall premise and think that a certain amount of misreading the text (re: the movies) is involved in a few too many of his conclusions, but Rocchi is a really sharp, smart guy and the piece is exceptionally well-argued - to the point that, while it's tempting to dismiss it out of hand as the same old "film critic rails against empty blockbusters" narrative re-skinned with a topical/clickable superhero theme (although it sort-of unavoidably is exactly that) it's just not proper to do so.
Anyway...
The thing that tends to stick with me about pieces like this is that, once they move on from the criticisms specific to the topic at hand (example: It's hard to argue that the demands of globalism requiring good/evil conflicts to be ever further removed from any relevant real-world context isn't creatively/narratively stifling, even for superhero movies) it all starts to descend into pointing out enduring truisms and insisting (against somewhat overwhelming evidence) that they are somehow "worse" in the present context, ergo:
YES, big-budget blockbuster movies tend to forego depth, texture and edge in their quest to appeal to the broadest possible audience... but somehow this fact that has existed since the Silent Era becomes exponentially worse because the broadly-sketched caricatures of Good and Evil are now wearing capes instead of cowboy hats (or badges, or pirate outfits, or whatever.)
YES, film writers who earn their clicks in the digital salt-mine by breathlessly publishing pieces about Infinity Stones and Continuity and whatever other easter-eggs Marvel peppers their films with (guilty) are effectively engaging in free marketing for the studios... but somehow this is MUCH more grievous a journalistic sin than handing studios free publicity by reporting on celebrity "news" (i.e. "What!? [Actress] said something provocative and headline-grabby? And it just happens to be the same week her new movie comes out!??") in decades past?
YES, for the pricetag of one AVENGERS: AGE OF ULTRON you could make a dozen romantic comedies, or workplace dramas, or important message-pieces; and the more studios are able to rely on big-ticket features the less inclined they'll be to spread the resources. That's a shame, but it's always been a shame. But the idea that if the "Marvel Boom" had never happened Hollywood would be spending it's money on less expensive, more nourishing (or, at least, more diversely-targeted) fare is ridiculous on its face - the money would simply be going to blockbusters just as big, just as bloated and just as "empty" but about different subjects, like scifi actioners (the 90s) buddy-cops (80s) natural disasters (70s) Biblical Tales (60s) or WWII (50s.)
Eventually, even the best-intentioned versions of this line of thinking transform into the film-genre version of white music journos railing against hip-hop amid its ascendence; wherein legitimate criticism/analysis would inevitably devolve into a stream of asinine assertions that the violence ("I shot a man in Reno...") misogyny ("Baby it's cold outside...") and winking nods to real-life criminality ("Jailhouse rock") in white popular-music was somehow less objectionable than the modern variations on the same coming out of Terrifying Young Black Men.
And while I don't know enough of Mr. Rocchi's background to even think about placing him decidedly in this particular camp, I can't help but be reminded in reading the piece again of similar dire contemplations by so many other critics; and in regards to those... well, I'm not someone who likes to armchair-diagnose the psyches of others, but in those cases (again, not necessarily including this current subject) it always ends up reading like personal resentment at professional alienation. Not saying it always is, just my read.
What I mean is, it's hard not to read takedown after takedown of this particular genre (and this particular studio - I have a sneaking suspicion that many critics are aching for an excuse to throw support behind the fandom-enraging but supposedly more "filmmaker driven" DC Universe movies) at this particular moment in time and not begin to ask if it really is about an ingrained bias against the genre; and while I don't think that's the general case I think it's part of the equation. The fact is, you can draw a direct line down the middle of all of professional film criticism (usually but not always generationally) between folks who, in addition to being cinephiles, also came up with the rest of the "geek ephemera" as part of their cultural development and those who... didn't.
Thusly, because it's so much easier for that first group to "engage" with what happens to be the overwhelmingly dominant genre/movement, that gives them a professional advantage that is often seen as unearned or unjust to the point of real, tangible resentment: "I can break down the aesthetic through-line of Lars Von Trier's entire post-Dogme95 output, but it won't draw 1/20th the traffic of some brat explaining whose giant dead head that was in the goddamn space raccoon movie!?" Of course you'd be pissed, why wouldn't you be pissed?
There's always a certain amount of resentment, especially in journalism and art, at generational "movements" sweeping their predecessors aside; but it really bubbles up hardcore when said generational movement can be easily viewed as one singular "other" - the aforementioned blacklash against the rise of hip-hop was very much "about" resentment at the idea of the "youth rebellion" music-mantle passing from white rockers to Black rappers. (And no, this doesn't mean anyone is being "called a racist" - take that back to Tumblr and express it through some FROZEN fan-art, please.)
Likewise, I think it's not out of line to suggest that the Marvel/comic/superhero backlash is coming at least in part from a place of resentment that the center of the Film Fandom universe has shifted from the repertory theater/coffee shop/cocktail bar to the comic book store/internet/social media world; that the "heat" in the business of film-writing is now mainly on a generational subset of folks whose connection to film and criticism began with the build-up to (and group-therapy come-down from) THE PHANTOM MENACE, got supercharged by the unprecedented web-news presence of the LORD OF THE RINGS, HARRY POTTER, SPIDER-MAN and X-MEN series in the early-00s and has now found them as vanguards of The New Mainstream in what I guess we have to call The Marvel Age of Movies. Rocchi's piece specifically namechecks Devin Faraci, who's damn near the poster child for this evolution: A guy who turned commenting on film-geek gossip forums into a paying gig and now operates the ultra-influential cinephile tastemaker site Birth.Movies.Death.
It's going to be interesting to see who "breaks" first here, the backlasher-critics or the thing they're backlashing at. A lot of the consternation about "superhero fatigue" (or lack thereof) is predicated on the idea (fear, occasionally) that the genre is self-sustaining and ending-proof: If Marvel releases ONE dud, three more are always still already in production and one of them is bound to hit and stop the "slippery slope talk." To a very real degree, Marvel's real genius has been to recognize that the media landscape of the present day allows the same content-publishing approach they built a comics empire on to be translated into movies and TV shows - and that comics empire lasted from the early-60s all the way into the mid-90s before it hit serious turbulence. On the other hand, Warner Bros is betting the farm on BATMAN V SUPERMAN being massive and beloved enough to spur interest in a second, competing superhero universe; but if audiences react to the film as unevenly as they've responded to it's marketing thus far... who knows? Could a failure that size be catastrophic enough to shake the whole industry out of it's comic-book love affair?
I get the sense that pretty soon you're going to see a concerted effort by "non geek" film press to simply ignore the genre outright, or at least to start treating the Marvel Universe productions the way it did James Bond movies for a good stretch; i.e. acknowledge that the built-in fanbase doesn't care what they think, that the series can really only be properly reviewed against its other entries (see also: ROCKY II - V) and only acknowledging when something otherwise noteworthy occurs within ("Oh! Marvel finally did their female-led movie!")
I'm not sure how feasible that is (the audience wants what it wants), and I also don't think it'd be for the best. It's certainly possible to be a film writer and not deal primarily with what's actually happening or relevant in the present of the medium, but the best and the brightest of "real" film journalism doesn't want to engage this genre in a deeper way (and I think that's what Rocchi's piece is sincerely trying to do, at least to begin with) on any level other than "This stuff isn't worth my time and why don't you care about how little I care!?" well, that's going to be a loss for the genre and for the writers.
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TV Recap: AGENTS OF S.H.I.E.L.D - Season 2 Episode 20: "SCARS"
Here's three things I don't often get to say about AGENTS OF S.H.I.E.L.D, all three of which apply to this overally pretty terrific installment:
"I didn't see that coming."
"I'm glad I didn't see that coming."
"I don't know who/what that's supposed to be."
Though it's played coy with the reveals and teases, AGENTS' second season has spent a solid chunk of it's time setting up what looked like a decent if fairly predictable scenario to lead into yet another new status-quo - either for next season or (some suspect) for CAPTAIN AMERICA: CIVIL WAR (next year) and THE INHUMANS (2019). While it still seems like pipe-laying for those films is very much a part of the game plan, "Scars" served to blow the "predictable" part to kingdom come; once more establishing that this offbeat little series has quietly managed to become the most consistently surprising corner of the Marvel Cinematic Universe.
To wit: Season 3 has had two overarching plotlines that revealed themselves in full around the midpoint and have merged as we hit the final stretch. Plotline 1: Agent Skye is actually an Inhuman -specifically the daughter of the leader/protector of a secret Inhuman community. Plotline 2: There's a secondary, better-armed would-be S.H.I.E.L.D relaunch that doesn't think Coulson is fit to be Director. Plotline 3: Coulson is keeping a second set of secrets from his own team, something called "Theta Protocol."
Plotline 3, revealed in full as "Scars" opens, turns out to be our innevitable tie-in to AVENGERS: AGE OF ULTRON: "Theta Protocol" refers to Coulson having kept a spare Hellicarrier gassed-up and ready should Nick Fury need it, and said "need" arises when Fury used it to evacuate civilians during Ultron's doomsday gambit - which strengthens my position last week that at least some AGENTS OF S.H.I.EL.D characters should've been on the ship in the movie, if for no other reason than the right kind of cheap pop.
But it's Plotline's 1 and 2 that still came front and center, and for awhile looked to be heading in a pretty obvious direction: "Real S.H.I.E.L.D" would turn out to be hostile to the existance of The Inhumans, triggering a conflict (exacerbated by Raina, who's been using her newfound future-telling powers to undermine Skye's mother Jaiying as leader of this branch of Inhumans) that would either mirror, spill-over into or even trigger the events of CIVIL WAR. Simple, effective, and in-keeping with Marvel's no-longer-secret goal of the INHUMANS as a franchise filling in the missing X-MEN spots in their Universe.
And for most of it's running time, "Scars" kept up the appearance of following exactly that path: No sooner had Coulson leveraged his role in thwarting Ultron into convincing Gonzales to integrate the two S.H.I.E.L.Ds (Gonzales and his brain trust becoming the new Security Council, Coulson remaining director) than did the Inhumans plot threaten to make things complicated all over again: Team Gonzales has figured out how to track Gordon the teleporter back to Afterlife (Jaiying's Inhuman retreat) and want to move on them - one of S.H.I.E.L.D's functions, you'll remember, being "indexing" superhumans and keeping tabs on them. Furthermore, Gonzales himself wants to be the one to have a sit-down with Jaiying, not the "compromised" Coulson.
Meanwhile, Raina is suspiciously warning that if anyone from S.H.I.E.L.D is allowed to meet Jaiying, a war is going to break out. Oh, and the "mystery item" in The Icarus' cargo hold? It's some kind of ancient Kree weapon whose existence terrifies The Inhumans. And so, the stage is set...
...and then everything goes in totally direction. Short version: Gonzales really does come in peace - but that doesn't mean Raina wasn't telling the truth! Jaiying - whom, you'll remember, was tortured and (literally) butchered by one of HYDRA's more unapologetically Nazi-descended adherents - turns out to have very strong feelings about the idea of making lists of "different" people, and not only does she kill Gonzales and wound herself to feign self-defense. And that's after she's already sent Skye's dad Calvin into S.H.I.E.L.D's "custody" having already downed multiple vials of the chemicals that give him his Mr, Hyde powers.
Very unexpected and well-executed, as twists go (though it becomes slightly less-so when you consider something needed to go wrong with Jaiying in order for Skye to come back to the team for Season 3) - it's nice to see things inverted so profoundly and still work out narratively. We're still getting the expected S.H.I.E.L.D/Inhumans fight with the expected people caught up in the middle, but on significantly different terms than were imagined beforehand.
I like where this is going, and it should make for a heck of a Season Finale next week... with the exception of the "Ward and still-evil Agent 33 kidnapped Bobbi" plot, which still isn't interesting and feels too blatantly of existing mainly to launch the already-announced Bobbi/Hunter spin-off series next year. But, maybe that storyline will surprise us, too.
PARTING THOUGHTS
NEXT WEEK:
"S.O.S" teases Skye vs May plus everyone vs everyone else, in what I'm guessing will end on some sort of cliffhanger - even though a Season 3 renewal hasn't been officially announced, everyone involved has been talking like it's a given (I can't see Disney not letting the series run to a syndication-friendly length) and even if it doesn't happen the Mockingbird/Hunter spin-off is already in the cards.
Very unexpected and well-executed, as twists go (though it becomes slightly less-so when you consider something needed to go wrong with Jaiying in order for Skye to come back to the team for Season 3) - it's nice to see things inverted so profoundly and still work out narratively. We're still getting the expected S.H.I.E.L.D/Inhumans fight with the expected people caught up in the middle, but on significantly different terms than were imagined beforehand.
I like where this is going, and it should make for a heck of a Season Finale next week... with the exception of the "Ward and still-evil Agent 33 kidnapped Bobbi" plot, which still isn't interesting and feels too blatantly of existing mainly to launch the already-announced Bobbi/Hunter spin-off series next year. But, maybe that storyline will surprise us, too.
PARTING THOUGHTS
- Joss Whedon has lately been pretty open about how he's not really onboard with the idea of Coulson's still-living-ness being acknowledged in the movies. Since he's no longer the guiding hand of THE AVENGERS going forward, however,
- No, I have no idea what the shape-shifting Kree rock thing in the cargo hold actually is. At the very least, its design and behavior doesn't line up with any relic/object/etc I'm familiar with from the comics' Universe - but, then again, considering they wound up hiding The Infinity Stones inside various other relics throughout the series, it really could be anything.
- The whole through-line of "May thinks of Skye as surrogate daughter" has paid off a lot better than I think anyone could've anticipated.
- Jaiying explains that while Terrigen Mist is not harmful to humans, The Inhumans (or her branch of them, at least) use artificially-grown Terrigen Crystals to which exposure is lethal because it contains trace elements of Diviner Metal. This A.) Feels like a pretty-good indicator that the cache of still-missing "pure" crystals will end up being triggered to "power-up" all or most of Earth's Inhuman population to kickstart the plot of either CIVIL WAR, INHUMANS or both; and B.) Is not a plot-hole - Tripp died because a piece of Diviner shrapnel hit his chest, not from the Mist being released.
- Re: The possibility of a CIVIL WAR lead-in: The CW comic had the push to register powered-persons kicked-off by a superhero brawl setting off an explosion in a populated area. Some kind of "Terrigen Bomb" going off and creating hundreds of thousands of newly-powered people all at once (likely resulting in chaos and plenty of injury/death even beyond an explosion) would likely have the same effect. Keep in mind that it's a (minor but highlighted) plot-point in AGE OF ULTRON that Captain America sees enhanced people like the Maximoff twins as largely indistinguishable from his own situation.
- Skye calls them "Inhumans" for the first time, saying it's their "ancient" name. This would seem to confirm that the more familiar "Royal Family" characters are either not believed present anymore or not known this sect.
- While acknowledging that it's likely a budget thing, I'll be really happy if Mr. Hyde goes full Hulk-out in the finale.
NEXT WEEK:
"S.O.S" teases Skye vs May plus everyone vs everyone else, in what I'm guessing will end on some sort of cliffhanger - even though a Season 3 renewal hasn't been officially announced, everyone involved has been talking like it's a given (I can't see Disney not letting the series run to a syndication-friendly length) and even if it doesn't happen the Mockingbird/Hunter spin-off is already in the cards.
REVIEW: Avengers: Age of Ultron
People look to the sky and imagine MovieBob going on sometime soon. I'll take that from them first.
Did you enjoy this review? Please consider supporting The MovieBob Patreon.
Did you enjoy this review? Please consider supporting The MovieBob Patreon.
ALL-NEW GAME OVERTHINKER - "Nintendo - WTF???"
Okay guys, here's the deal:
Yes, The Game OverThinker (aka me) is back in an all-new, all-different incarnation at ScrewAttack. You can watch the first episode on YouTube now (direct link to SA once there is one.)
This show and a second top-secret series will be running on alternating weekends for several weeks heading into Summer. Will there be more after that? Well, we want that to happen - but whether or not it does is at least in part up to YOU; since things can really only stick around if people want them to.
That's where you folks come in...
If you like the new show, liked the old show, like my other shows, want me to keep producing content in general, here's how you can help: Watch the show. Like/favorite/etc it. Tweet it. Facebook it. Share to every social media spot you post to. Send it to as many friends, family, colleagues, associates, enemies, whatever and ask them to ALSO like/favorite/tweet/facebook etc it. Hell, if you want to tell ScrewAttack that you like the show and want to keep seeing more of it, I bet that's a good idea, too!
I'm proud of this new series, I want it to succeed, and I need it to not just do well - I need it to blow the hell up :)
So, please - help me blow this thing up, huh?
P.S. If you're a fan of my other work and would like to show support for that as well, there's still always The MovieBob Patreon
Really That Good: THE AVENGERS
My AGE OF ULTRON review is pending. Until then, please enjoy this look back at the original AVENGERS:
P.S. "Really That Good" episodes are fairly labor-intensive projects that cannot be monetized (so far) because of fair use legal stuff. If you'd like to encourage/support the production of more, PLEASE consider The MovieBob Patreon.
P.S. "Really That Good" episodes are fairly labor-intensive projects that cannot be monetized (so far) because of fair use legal stuff. If you'd like to encourage/support the production of more, PLEASE consider The MovieBob Patreon.
TV Recap: AGENTS OF S.H.I.E.L.D - Season 2 Episode 19: "THE DIRTY HALF DOZEN"
NOTE: To support more blogs/articles/etc like this one, please consider supporting The MovieBob Patreon.
Much of "THE DIRTY HALF DOZEN" is predicated on a pair of ideas that I'm not sure have even half as much truth in them as AGENTS OF S.H.I.E.L.D seems to think they do. Firstly: That at this point, people are still expecting/demanding this series to drop everything and bend over backwards to reference whatever is currently happening in the Marvel movies. Secondly: That there's enough lingering nostalgia for the series' Season 1 incarnation that a contrived re-grouping of The Original Team Arrangement will be a big pop.
It's not an episode without it's charms (there's a RAID-inspired long-take shootout sequence for Skye that probably rates as Chloe Bennett's best action moment thus far) and it says something about how far the series has come that my reaction to an MCU tie-in episode is "Guys, everyone knows The Avengers are fighting a robot this weekend. Can we get back to the story at hand?;" but it's distracting none the less.
SPOILERS and more after the jump...
Continuing from last week, Coulson's S.H.I.E.L.D and "Real S.H.I.E.L.D" have set aside their differences (or so it seems) in order to drop the hammer on a HYDRA base where Dr. List is conducting experiments on abducted Inhumans (the ads are finally calling them that, at least) and also Deathlok as a "satellite program" of what Baron Strucker is up to over in AGE OF ULTRON. Skye wants to go help, her mother (Inhuman safe-space leader Jaiying) is against it for "let's not let the world know we're here" reasons.
The decision gets made for them when Raina, having figured out that her "nightmares" are actually the power to see the future, outs Skye as Jaiying and Calvin/Mr. Hyde's daughter and reveals that she's "supposed" to go help. And so we get an awkward "Season 1 reunion" middle-act wherein Ward rejoins Skye, Coulson, May, Fitz and Simmons on The Bus to go take on the bad guys and ruminate over how much their relationships have changed in the interim.
This is all well and good, and the "storm the base" stuff works in the scrappy, low-tech terms the series has by now mastered (again, Skye's one-woman-army bit is a seasonal high point). Unfortunately, the tie-in stuff rears it's head in a way that's both annoyingly intrusive (so wait - all of S.H.I.E.L.D, random individual people and a bunch of The Avengers' sidekicks/friends can know Coulson is alive... but just not The Avengers themselves for some reason?) and also not intrusive enough (Team Coulson is essentially doing pre-rinse for ULTRON's pre-credits battle against Strucker, just in a less-expensive location with a less-expensive HYDRA guy.) I'm hesitant to mark things down too much here, because it feels like "What is Theta Protocol?" will be an ULTRON-fallout thing, but for now it's all very awkward.
(Sidebar: Without spoiling, there's an "All is lost... wait, no it's not!" beat in the finale of AGE OF ULTRON where the Agents could've shown up for totally logical, sensible reasons; and it felt like a missed opportunity that they didn't. I mean, if they wanted to leave out or "background detail" Coulson so as not to have to deal with that whole can of worms; some combination of May, Skye, Fitz, Simmons, Hunter, Bobbi, Mac, The Koenigs etc could've been onhand easily. It would've gotten a huge pop from the diehards in the audience while not affecting non-viewers one way or the other.)
On the other hand, the goings on do seem to introduce (re-introduce?) a new complication that could have pretty interesting implications: Since the return from break, the idea that some kind of dark switch has been flipped on Simmons' moral compass has cropped up intermittently, but for awhile it seemed to be limited exclusively to her feelings about how to deal with Enhanced ("powered people") threats... but that no longer seems to be the case: She inserts herself into the field mission with the expressed intent of revenge-killing Ward, but instead ends up murdering HYDRA lackey Sunil Bakshi instead - with Ward being aware of this and going on the run again.
That's... interesting, if they do anything with it. I'm not sure I'm 100% sold on the idea of Simmons going "evil" somehow, but I'm interested to see them try it.
PARTING THOUGHTS:
NEXT WEEK:
Yup. Surprising absolutely nobody, "SCARS" appears to be the beginning of Good S.H.I.E.L.D and Bad S.H.I.E.L.D coming to blows over how to respond to the existance of The Inhumans, who we're finally calling that by name. This is the first real step in AGENTS' first turn at laying foundations for events in the Cinematic Universe (re: establishing The Inhumans as the MCU's X-Men/Mutants stand-in) rather than reacting to them, so it's going to be telling to see show that goes.
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Much of "THE DIRTY HALF DOZEN" is predicated on a pair of ideas that I'm not sure have even half as much truth in them as AGENTS OF S.H.I.E.L.D seems to think they do. Firstly: That at this point, people are still expecting/demanding this series to drop everything and bend over backwards to reference whatever is currently happening in the Marvel movies. Secondly: That there's enough lingering nostalgia for the series' Season 1 incarnation that a contrived re-grouping of The Original Team Arrangement will be a big pop.
It's not an episode without it's charms (there's a RAID-inspired long-take shootout sequence for Skye that probably rates as Chloe Bennett's best action moment thus far) and it says something about how far the series has come that my reaction to an MCU tie-in episode is "Guys, everyone knows The Avengers are fighting a robot this weekend. Can we get back to the story at hand?;" but it's distracting none the less.
SPOILERS and more after the jump...
Continuing from last week, Coulson's S.H.I.E.L.D and "Real S.H.I.E.L.D" have set aside their differences (or so it seems) in order to drop the hammer on a HYDRA base where Dr. List is conducting experiments on abducted Inhumans (the ads are finally calling them that, at least) and also Deathlok as a "satellite program" of what Baron Strucker is up to over in AGE OF ULTRON. Skye wants to go help, her mother (Inhuman safe-space leader Jaiying) is against it for "let's not let the world know we're here" reasons.
The decision gets made for them when Raina, having figured out that her "nightmares" are actually the power to see the future, outs Skye as Jaiying and Calvin/Mr. Hyde's daughter and reveals that she's "supposed" to go help. And so we get an awkward "Season 1 reunion" middle-act wherein Ward rejoins Skye, Coulson, May, Fitz and Simmons on The Bus to go take on the bad guys and ruminate over how much their relationships have changed in the interim.
This is all well and good, and the "storm the base" stuff works in the scrappy, low-tech terms the series has by now mastered (again, Skye's one-woman-army bit is a seasonal high point). Unfortunately, the tie-in stuff rears it's head in a way that's both annoyingly intrusive (so wait - all of S.H.I.E.L.D, random individual people and a bunch of The Avengers' sidekicks/friends can know Coulson is alive... but just not The Avengers themselves for some reason?) and also not intrusive enough (Team Coulson is essentially doing pre-rinse for ULTRON's pre-credits battle against Strucker, just in a less-expensive location with a less-expensive HYDRA guy.) I'm hesitant to mark things down too much here, because it feels like "What is Theta Protocol?" will be an ULTRON-fallout thing, but for now it's all very awkward.
(Sidebar: Without spoiling, there's an "All is lost... wait, no it's not!" beat in the finale of AGE OF ULTRON where the Agents could've shown up for totally logical, sensible reasons; and it felt like a missed opportunity that they didn't. I mean, if they wanted to leave out or "background detail" Coulson so as not to have to deal with that whole can of worms; some combination of May, Skye, Fitz, Simmons, Hunter, Bobbi, Mac, The Koenigs etc could've been onhand easily. It would've gotten a huge pop from the diehards in the audience while not affecting non-viewers one way or the other.)
On the other hand, the goings on do seem to introduce (re-introduce?) a new complication that could have pretty interesting implications: Since the return from break, the idea that some kind of dark switch has been flipped on Simmons' moral compass has cropped up intermittently, but for awhile it seemed to be limited exclusively to her feelings about how to deal with Enhanced ("powered people") threats... but that no longer seems to be the case: She inserts herself into the field mission with the expressed intent of revenge-killing Ward, but instead ends up murdering HYDRA lackey Sunil Bakshi instead - with Ward being aware of this and going on the run again.
That's... interesting, if they do anything with it. I'm not sure I'm 100% sold on the idea of Simmons going "evil" somehow, but I'm interested to see them try it.
PARTING THOUGHTS:
- I know I sound like a broken record here, but Ward still isn't interesting. He only briefly became interesting once his Ken Doll blandness was revealed to be have been a cover in Season 1, it hasn't carried over into his role as a general bad guy and this new idea that he's angling for some kind of redemption arc ("returning" Agent 33 to S.H.I.E.L.D for her own good) isn't helping either.
- Glad to see the mystery of what The Icarus (Gonzales' ship) is hiding in its cargo hold turn up again, if only because I like that I still have no clue what it actually is (Mar-Vell or The Abomination remain my hopes.)
- Blowing up The Bus for good should've felt more substantive than it did. I get that it's meant to be an ironic punchline to the "return of Season 1" thing, but it didn't really land.
NEXT WEEK:
Yup. Surprising absolutely nobody, "SCARS" appears to be the beginning of Good S.H.I.E.L.D and Bad S.H.I.E.L.D coming to blows over how to respond to the existance of The Inhumans, who we're finally calling that by name. This is the first real step in AGENTS' first turn at laying foundations for events in the Cinematic Universe (re: establishing The Inhumans as the MCU's X-Men/Mutants stand-in) rather than reacting to them, so it's going to be telling to see show that goes.
NOTE: To support more blogs/articles/etc like this one, please consider supporting The MovieBob Patreon.
Oh, You Didn't Know???
...Your ass better CALL SOMEBODY!!!
Can't wait for @the_moviebob to make his triumphant return to @ScrewAttack with The Game OverThinker this Sunday!
— ScrewAttack Crew (@ScrewAttack) April 27, 2015
Disney's DESCENDANTS First Trailer is... Peppy? Let's Go With Peppy.
I'm getting to the point where I'm exactly old enough that a necessary (and welcome!) distance from "youth culture" on the whole and regular interactions with the teen-and-under set not really existing for the most part is beginning to make the tail-end of The Millennials look increasingly alien to me - which is a red flag in my business. So I try to keep an open mind when regarding stuff clearly aimed as far away from me as humanly possible.
That having been said, here's the trailer for Disney's ambitious "what if our characters had kids and they all went to school together" TV movie project DESCENDANTS:
To be honest? The main thing jumping out at me here is how little the Disney Channel house-style seems to have changed since I was "that age." The pop-culture cues are different (no way Carlos would've been played quite so outwardly... "fashionable" in the 90s, yes?), the basic energy and attitude are pretty-much the same - which sort of throws into sharp relief just how much what we think of as organically-occurring cultural "vibes" are shaped by media. Disney Channel has effectively staked itself as the driver of late-GenX and Millennial tweenhood, and that's that.
Oh, the movie? Looks cute. The whole thing sort of feels like a DeviantArt project that someone greenlit to series as a joke, but there's potential here and I like that it looks notably different from ONCE UPON A TIME. If nothing else, it's a marvel of how good Disney is at working their iconography machine: Even without the names and most obvious cue(s) present in this trailer, you can pretty easily tell who the King and Queen are supposed to be, so that's amusing, right?
Whatever. You can pretty much tell this thing is going to be absolutely huge, and a decade from now we'll be reading thinkpieces from now-35-year-old Millennials explaining why it actually wasn't as disposable as it was judged to be in it's day. So, look forward to that I guess?
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That having been said, here's the trailer for Disney's ambitious "what if our characters had kids and they all went to school together" TV movie project DESCENDANTS:
To be honest? The main thing jumping out at me here is how little the Disney Channel house-style seems to have changed since I was "that age." The pop-culture cues are different (no way Carlos would've been played quite so outwardly... "fashionable" in the 90s, yes?), the basic energy and attitude are pretty-much the same - which sort of throws into sharp relief just how much what we think of as organically-occurring cultural "vibes" are shaped by media. Disney Channel has effectively staked itself as the driver of late-GenX and Millennial tweenhood, and that's that.
Oh, the movie? Looks cute. The whole thing sort of feels like a DeviantArt project that someone greenlit to series as a joke, but there's potential here and I like that it looks notably different from ONCE UPON A TIME. If nothing else, it's a marvel of how good Disney is at working their iconography machine: Even without the names and most obvious cue(s) present in this trailer, you can pretty easily tell who the King and Queen are supposed to be, so that's amusing, right?
Whatever. You can pretty much tell this thing is going to be absolutely huge, and a decade from now we'll be reading thinkpieces from now-35-year-old Millennials explaining why it actually wasn't as disposable as it was judged to be in it's day. So, look forward to that I guess?
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This Is Your New DC Cinematic Universe JOKER
There may come a day when there's no more need for (by now) tired, cheap-shot references to how effortlessly satisfying the Marvel movies have been versus the endless cycle of self-inflicted stumbles Warner Bros. DC Cinematic Universe has undergone.
A day when we can actually look forward to the JUSTICE LEAGUE-adjacent features with "I hope it's good" anticipation and not "I wonder what *type* of trainwreck" anticipation.
A day when it's no longer appropriate to point out the disparity between a studio dithering over whether or not a woman can carry a feature film versus another putting a talking raccoon on a marquee.
A day when you can assume that at least *some* ideas are too stupid to not make it into the post-MAN OF STEEL DC movieverse.
But it is not this day.
TV Recap: AGENTS OF S.H.I.E.L.D - Season 2 Episode 18: "THE FRENEMY OF MY ENEMY"
For a change, "Frenemy" provides an opportunity to properly/honestly appraise an AGENTS OF S.H.I.E.L.D episode up front without dropping spoilers (since Season 2's entire second half is now a big-deal Marvel Universe mythology-reveal) and incurring the wrath of binge watchers.
So, then. Short version: This is the season's stupidest title, but possibly it's best episode. Want more than that (with SPOILERS?) keep reading after the jump...
One thing (among many) that Season 2 of AGENTS OF S.H.I.E.L.D has done better than Season 1 is to "answer" the justifiable criticism of the series failing to measure up to its (implicit) promise of staying fresh and vibrant by flitting between the various worlds of the Marvel Universe by quietly building a fairly substantial "sub-universe" of its own: As this second season winds down, AGENTS now has enough levels, strata and moving parts between Coulson's S.H.I.E.L.D, "Real S.H.I.E.L.D," The Inhumans, the attention they draw from The Kree and Asgard (well, okay, just Lady Sif for now but still) the adjacent machinations of rogue supervillain Calvin "Mister Hyde" Johnson, rogue vanilla-villain Grant Ward and HYDRA that it's that much easier to "forgive" Coulson and Company for not bumping into Iron Man or The Hulk more often (or, y'know, ever.)
On the down side, in recent episodes those moving parts had begun to move a little too far apart from one another - to the point where there wasn't much connecting (in the most obvious examples) the S.H.I.E.L.D vs S.H.I.E.L.D story with Agent Skye's discovery that she's actually one of the (still unnamed) Inhumans beyond the prior relationships between the characters. "Frenemy" sets about bringing these (and other) divergent plot-threads back to one place and (shockingly!) manages to feel almost organic while doing so.
The setup(s): May and Simmons are pretending to help Superhuman-phobic "Real S.H.I.E.L.D" look for Fitz and Coulson, who've absconded with Nick Fury's "Toolbox" and its index of... everything, basically. Coulson, Hunter, Deathlok and Fitz meanwhile have scooped up Ward and Agent 33 to help them find the two surviving HYDRA bigwigs, Dr. List and Baron Strucker (this appears to be our big tie-in to AGE OF ULTRON) on the logic that they've been abducting/experimenting on "powered people" (we're still not calling them Inhumans, I guess) and thus might be behind Skye's disappearance or at least know about it. Skye, of course, has actually been hanging out at The Inhumans' (or, more likely, a smaller community thereof) secret retreat, getting to know her surprisingly still-living Inhuman mother Jaiying and less-surprisingly still-insane science-enhanced father Cal/Mr. Hyde.
Since this is AGENTS OF S.H.I.E.L.D, all of these huge interests and powerful characters ultimately converge on... a relatively-inexpensive shooting location - in this case Cal's abandoned Milwaukee doctor's office, where Skye is supposed to be letting him down gently about not being allowed to hang around Afterlife (The Inhuman's refuge) any more because of the whole evil/not-Inhuman thing. Misunderstandings abound, mostly because people keep first glimpsing Coulson either in the company of "complicated" individuals like Ward or Deathlok. Things wrap up (so to speak) with Skye and Cal vanished again (List was actually chasing Gordon's teleportation energy signature around) and Coulson seemingly pretending to hand himself over to Real S.H.I.E.L.D; setting up what's being promoted as an action-heavy episode next week.
PARTING THOUGHTS
NEXT WEEK:
"The Dirty Half Dozen" purportedly finds the two S.H.I.E.L.Ds working together for an attack on what looks like it could well be the same facility Baron Strucker was hanging out in during the post-credit scene of WINTER SOLDIER and is (assumed to be) occupying during whatever point he turns up in AGE OF ULTRON. I wonder if they'll be brazen enough to suggest that this is taking place in the same relative time-frame, i.e. "Oh wow, The Avengers just got here! I mean, it's too bad we were just leaving so we can't meet or in any way interact with them, but hey it's cool they're here, huh?"
So, then. Short version: This is the season's stupidest title, but possibly it's best episode. Want more than that (with SPOILERS?) keep reading after the jump...
One thing (among many) that Season 2 of AGENTS OF S.H.I.E.L.D has done better than Season 1 is to "answer" the justifiable criticism of the series failing to measure up to its (implicit) promise of staying fresh and vibrant by flitting between the various worlds of the Marvel Universe by quietly building a fairly substantial "sub-universe" of its own: As this second season winds down, AGENTS now has enough levels, strata and moving parts between Coulson's S.H.I.E.L.D, "Real S.H.I.E.L.D," The Inhumans, the attention they draw from The Kree and Asgard (well, okay, just Lady Sif for now but still) the adjacent machinations of rogue supervillain Calvin "Mister Hyde" Johnson, rogue vanilla-villain Grant Ward and HYDRA that it's that much easier to "forgive" Coulson and Company for not bumping into Iron Man or The Hulk more often (or, y'know, ever.)
On the down side, in recent episodes those moving parts had begun to move a little too far apart from one another - to the point where there wasn't much connecting (in the most obvious examples) the S.H.I.E.L.D vs S.H.I.E.L.D story with Agent Skye's discovery that she's actually one of the (still unnamed) Inhumans beyond the prior relationships between the characters. "Frenemy" sets about bringing these (and other) divergent plot-threads back to one place and (shockingly!) manages to feel almost organic while doing so.
The setup(s): May and Simmons are pretending to help Superhuman-phobic "Real S.H.I.E.L.D" look for Fitz and Coulson, who've absconded with Nick Fury's "Toolbox" and its index of... everything, basically. Coulson, Hunter, Deathlok and Fitz meanwhile have scooped up Ward and Agent 33 to help them find the two surviving HYDRA bigwigs, Dr. List and Baron Strucker (this appears to be our big tie-in to AGE OF ULTRON) on the logic that they've been abducting/experimenting on "powered people" (we're still not calling them Inhumans, I guess) and thus might be behind Skye's disappearance or at least know about it. Skye, of course, has actually been hanging out at The Inhumans' (or, more likely, a smaller community thereof) secret retreat, getting to know her surprisingly still-living Inhuman mother Jaiying and less-surprisingly still-insane science-enhanced father Cal/Mr. Hyde.
Since this is AGENTS OF S.H.I.E.L.D, all of these huge interests and powerful characters ultimately converge on... a relatively-inexpensive shooting location - in this case Cal's abandoned Milwaukee doctor's office, where Skye is supposed to be letting him down gently about not being allowed to hang around Afterlife (The Inhuman's refuge) any more because of the whole evil/not-Inhuman thing. Misunderstandings abound, mostly because people keep first glimpsing Coulson either in the company of "complicated" individuals like Ward or Deathlok. Things wrap up (so to speak) with Skye and Cal vanished again (List was actually chasing Gordon's teleportation energy signature around) and Coulson seemingly pretending to hand himself over to Real S.H.I.E.L.D; setting up what's being promoted as an action-heavy episode next week.
PARTING THOUGHTS
- We now know that the Bobbi and Hunter are getting a spin-off, so... I guess that sort of spoils whether or not they'll A.) survive the season or B.) still be good guys (unless it's a prequel?)
- Unless I'm forgetting, this is the first time Skye has referred to herself as "Daisy Johnson." Did Calvin not mention his last name previously?
- Raina (not actually appearing in the episode) is suggested to be the first known precognition-powered person (Inhuman or otherwise?) documented on Earth. The idea that precognition is the big red-flag "not real yet" superpower has been repeatedly brought up back to Season 1, but at this point I'm at a loss as to what this is building to.
- We've been told a few times now that we've not seen Cal at his worst - is it too much to hope that there's a shape/form to him that's closer to how Mr. Hyde is typically portrayed in the comics, then?
- Sidebar: Is it just me, or has Cal/Hyde very gradually evolved into one of the more compelling MCU villains? It's easy to forget that McLachlan is a really great actor in the right part, and that he's been able to find (and convey) relatable humanity in such an over-the-top character (he's basically playing a Hulk who doesn't transform - so far). The business with him and Skye wandering around his old city, which has changed to a degree he can hardly cope with in the decades he's been living in a supervillain rage-haze, is genuinely moving stuff.
NEXT WEEK:
"The Dirty Half Dozen" purportedly finds the two S.H.I.E.L.Ds working together for an attack on what looks like it could well be the same facility Baron Strucker was hanging out in during the post-credit scene of WINTER SOLDIER and is (assumed to be) occupying during whatever point he turns up in AGE OF ULTRON. I wonder if they'll be brazen enough to suggest that this is taking place in the same relative time-frame, i.e. "Oh wow, The Avengers just got here! I mean, it's too bad we were just leaving so we can't meet or in any way interact with them, but hey it's cool they're here, huh?"
FANTASTIC FOUR Official Trailer looks... I dunno
Fairly or not (spoiler: it's not), it's becoming increasingly clear that the ongoing Marvel Studios success story is basically ruining the prospects of many fans (myself included) to have any kind of proper "anticipation factor" for Marvel Comics adaptations made by anybody else. It's one thing to have a vague sense that this or that film might be better off in other hands, but another to know (in the case of an adaptation) that A.) you're not getting a version remotely close to what you might've hoped to see and B.) that you all but certainly would be getting that version if not for circumstance of contracts and rights issues.
Case in point: This new most-recent trailer for FANTASTIC FOUR, which has me struggling to figure out if I'm underwhelmed and irritated that it looks like a drab, dreary misuse of The Fantastic Four or that it looks like a drab, dreary movie - period:
I dunno.
The previous trailers weren't wonderful either, but at least there was enough vagueness at play to make it a legit question whether this looked like an outright bad movie or a movie I'd otherwise be more into if it weren't trying to convince me it's a FANTASTIC FOUR movie.
Thus far, what they've been selling has looked more like Josh Trank's obligatory "bigger-budget version of the low-budget movie you just broke big on" entry with FF trappings awkwardly stuck to it; and while this still looks like that it's also clearly meant to be the "Yup, it's Fantastic Four!" trailer: Everyone is onscreen using their powers, reveal of The Thing, shot of Doctor(?) Doom while someone says "doom," etc. For good measure, they've even thrown in the "hard open on city-skyline over loud bass sting" thing, so you know it's a superhero movie.
And it mostly looks just... bad.
I like some of this. The general look is dreary and glum, which is about as tonally opposite the property as you can get... but it's a well-shot, handsome looking version of dreary and glum, like someone working to imitate David Fincher's preferred aesthetic. The cast seems to have chemistry, I like Reed not knowing how a fist-bump works, Michael B. Jordan continues to impress, etc.
The downside? Everything else. I dig the shot of Reed's arm-muscles shifting around, but at the same time it makes me worry that they're going to "nerf" his power-set away from "guy made of rubber" to "has stretchy limbs." Kate Mara doesn't seem to be registering as either Sue Storm or as a general presence. The Thing looks like he'd make a decent rock-monster minion in a fantasy feature of some sort, but he's just not Ben Grimm and I always hate versions of The Thing that go the easy "made of rocks" route rather than the more alien, interesting classic designs.
Doom? Egh... it's only one shot (and then another from the back), but you can already tell they're going with him being another "altered" person like the heroes (the mask looks semi-transparent, maybe containing some kind of energy or for life-support) and... like I said, egh. I'm all for reinterpretation, but when it comes to Doctor Doom you're not just talking about another piece of Marvel/FF mythos - you're talking about one of the greatest villains in popular fiction of all time. Is it seriously too much to ask that we get a proper version of him onscreen before all the revisionism?
Case in point: This new most-recent trailer for FANTASTIC FOUR, which has me struggling to figure out if I'm underwhelmed and irritated that it looks like a drab, dreary misuse of The Fantastic Four or that it looks like a drab, dreary movie - period:
I dunno.
The previous trailers weren't wonderful either, but at least there was enough vagueness at play to make it a legit question whether this looked like an outright bad movie or a movie I'd otherwise be more into if it weren't trying to convince me it's a FANTASTIC FOUR movie.
Thus far, what they've been selling has looked more like Josh Trank's obligatory "bigger-budget version of the low-budget movie you just broke big on" entry with FF trappings awkwardly stuck to it; and while this still looks like that it's also clearly meant to be the "Yup, it's Fantastic Four!" trailer: Everyone is onscreen using their powers, reveal of The Thing, shot of Doctor(?) Doom while someone says "doom," etc. For good measure, they've even thrown in the "hard open on city-skyline over loud bass sting" thing, so you know it's a superhero movie.
And it mostly looks just... bad.
I like some of this. The general look is dreary and glum, which is about as tonally opposite the property as you can get... but it's a well-shot, handsome looking version of dreary and glum, like someone working to imitate David Fincher's preferred aesthetic. The cast seems to have chemistry, I like Reed not knowing how a fist-bump works, Michael B. Jordan continues to impress, etc.
The downside? Everything else. I dig the shot of Reed's arm-muscles shifting around, but at the same time it makes me worry that they're going to "nerf" his power-set away from "guy made of rubber" to "has stretchy limbs." Kate Mara doesn't seem to be registering as either Sue Storm or as a general presence. The Thing looks like he'd make a decent rock-monster minion in a fantasy feature of some sort, but he's just not Ben Grimm and I always hate versions of The Thing that go the easy "made of rocks" route rather than the more alien, interesting classic designs.
Doom? Egh... it's only one shot (and then another from the back), but you can already tell they're going with him being another "altered" person like the heroes (the mask looks semi-transparent, maybe containing some kind of energy or for life-support) and... like I said, egh. I'm all for reinterpretation, but when it comes to Doctor Doom you're not just talking about another piece of Marvel/FF mythos - you're talking about one of the greatest villains in popular fiction of all time. Is it seriously too much to ask that we get a proper version of him onscreen before all the revisionism?
Darkness. No Parents.
Wanted to put this up yesterday, but I'm having an... interesting few weeks, scheduling and lifewise. Ah well. Anyway, here's the trailer Warner Bros. wanted people to trek out to IMAX theaters for on Monday but we forced to release online after someone leaked it hoping that a clean version would make the reactions not be so negative. It didn't seem to help much, but judge for yourself:
So, the blowback on this has been pretty negative. Understandably yet still unfairly, a lot of the geek blogosphere really, really wants the new DC Cinematic Universe to essentially look/feel like the DC Animated Universe (Batman: The Animated Series to Justice League Unlimited) as-produced by Marvel Studios; and while I get why (that sounds great!) it's crystal clear that that's not what they're making and this stuff needs to be judged on it's own terms - good or bad.
It feels more than ever like no one working on these can really "square" how to make Superman work in the kind of movies they want to make (how do you use a character who can end any real threat instantly and generally works to prevent destruction "work" in the Transformers-esque extended-destruction style WB clearly wants these movies to be?) and so the plot becomes about making everyone else not "get" Superman either. I know more than I should about how the plot of this supposedly goes down, but suffice it to say these things seem to start from the premise of "which trades are still bestsellers for us?" and go forward, so if this is looking like Miller's DARK KNIGHT RETURNS smooshed together with a bunch of 90s event crossovers... yeah, that seems to be the case.
That said, I like the way it looks. We're a long way from MAN OF STEEL here, with Snyder once again working with his favorite DP Larry Fong. Visually we're very much in WATCHMEN territory, and it compliments Snyder's aggressively macho approach to the genre. It looks pumped-up, ridiculous, slick and showy - like a mid-90s foil cover come to life - and since that seems to be where they're aiming it might as well look like the best version possible.
Also: that first shot of Affleck in the "normal" bat-suit is probably as good as Batman's getup has ever looked in live-action, but I really want to know how much of those muscles are Affleck and how much is the suit because holy shit - if that's Affleck he must be on Ryback's regimen. On the other hand, the "big reveal" of the TDKR "bat-armor" look (which you know is meant to be a huge deal here) manages to fall completely flat because now it makes him look like Lego Batman. I'm getting a sense that LEGO MOVIE's send-up of dark-dark-dark Batman-performances may have rendered a good chunk of audience no longer able to take them as seriously, and the helmet isn't helping:
So, the blowback on this has been pretty negative. Understandably yet still unfairly, a lot of the geek blogosphere really, really wants the new DC Cinematic Universe to essentially look/feel like the DC Animated Universe (Batman: The Animated Series to Justice League Unlimited) as-produced by Marvel Studios; and while I get why (that sounds great!) it's crystal clear that that's not what they're making and this stuff needs to be judged on it's own terms - good or bad.
It feels more than ever like no one working on these can really "square" how to make Superman work in the kind of movies they want to make (how do you use a character who can end any real threat instantly and generally works to prevent destruction "work" in the Transformers-esque extended-destruction style WB clearly wants these movies to be?) and so the plot becomes about making everyone else not "get" Superman either. I know more than I should about how the plot of this supposedly goes down, but suffice it to say these things seem to start from the premise of "which trades are still bestsellers for us?" and go forward, so if this is looking like Miller's DARK KNIGHT RETURNS smooshed together with a bunch of 90s event crossovers... yeah, that seems to be the case.
That said, I like the way it looks. We're a long way from MAN OF STEEL here, with Snyder once again working with his favorite DP Larry Fong. Visually we're very much in WATCHMEN territory, and it compliments Snyder's aggressively macho approach to the genre. It looks pumped-up, ridiculous, slick and showy - like a mid-90s foil cover come to life - and since that seems to be where they're aiming it might as well look like the best version possible.
Also: that first shot of Affleck in the "normal" bat-suit is probably as good as Batman's getup has ever looked in live-action, but I really want to know how much of those muscles are Affleck and how much is the suit because holy shit - if that's Affleck he must be on Ryback's regimen. On the other hand, the "big reveal" of the TDKR "bat-armor" look (which you know is meant to be a huge deal here) manages to fall completely flat because now it makes him look like Lego Batman. I'm getting a sense that LEGO MOVIE's send-up of dark-dark-dark Batman-performances may have rendered a good chunk of audience no longer able to take them as seriously, and the helmet isn't helping:
TV Recap: AGENTS OF S.H.I.E.L.D - Season 2 Episode 17: "MELINDA"
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Having now introduced somewhere just under a dozen new yet-to-be-solved mysteries in it's second season (what's "Real S.H.I.E.L.D's" real agenda, what's really going on at Afterlife, what's in The Iliad's super-secret cargo hold, what exactly is Cal using to gain his strength to name just a few), "Melinda" finds AGENTS OF S.H.I.E.L.D doubling back to explain a leftover from Season 1: What really happened to earn Agent May the nickname "The Cavalry" (official story: She singlehandedly took down a superhuman villain and their entire army of henchmen) and why is she so cold and mysterious about it?
The answer and more (SPOILERS!) after the jump...
So, the idea that something a lot darker than "just" a rescue went down with May in Bahrain has been a given since they decided not to reveal it right away; but the actual reveal (she actually only took out two henchmen, the rest were killed by their own master - a pre-teen girl Inhuman who'd transformed without authorization from... whoever is making that call - that May was forced to kill) was a lot darker than AGENTS is usually prepared to go, so that's interesting in itself.
Interesting enough, in fact, that it probably could've stood to be it's own story. Weaving it into Skye bonding with Jaioying works narratively, but it also ends up giving away the twist too easily: "Gee, I wonder if May's story will somehow pay off in a way the ties-in with the 'not every Inhuman should transition' infodump?" On the other hand, it feels wrong to criticize the show for wasting no time getting Skye to her "learning its your mother" moment so quickly when the lack of padding had been so praiseworthy all season - especially since I've also been watching through DAREDEVIL this week, which (while overall a solid series - review likely pending) is padded and stretched-out to the point of near absurdity at times.
Meanwhile, our new big piece of information is that Coulson actually does seem to have been secretly assembling what sounds like a personal army of superhumans, as part of something called "Theta Protocol." This is, apparently, where a bunch of S.H.I.E.L.D 2.0's money has gone, and the majority of the actual data is in the toolbox that just walked out the door with Fitz last week. Oh, and if you were guessing that Raina's complaint of constant nightmares was foreshadowing an Inhuman power for future-telling? Congratulations - you've seen a superhero show before.
Still, the "showpiece" for this episode was seeing Ming-Na Wen stretch her acting chops alongside her action work, and it delivered on that front - she turns in a hell of a performance that momentarily turns so "real" it almost feels out of place with all the broader genre-series business going on. There's only about 4 - 5 more of these left, and there's a lot of plot to tie up, so this might have been our last shot at a "character piece" episode before a sprint to the finish like last season. If so, it's a good note to transition on.
PARTING THOUGHTS:
NEXT WEEK:
The ads are acting like "Frenemy of My Enemy" is an AGE OF ULTRON tie-in, but I'm a bit skeptical - there's at least one more episode between this and the film's U.S. release, and other than the still sought-after Dr. List the prospect of a WINTER SOLDIER-level tie-in seems unlikely from a logistical perspective.
Enjoy this recap? Please consider contributing to The MovieBob Patreon to help ensure more like it continue to be produced.
Having now introduced somewhere just under a dozen new yet-to-be-solved mysteries in it's second season (what's "Real S.H.I.E.L.D's" real agenda, what's really going on at Afterlife, what's in The Iliad's super-secret cargo hold, what exactly is Cal using to gain his strength to name just a few), "Melinda" finds AGENTS OF S.H.I.E.L.D doubling back to explain a leftover from Season 1: What really happened to earn Agent May the nickname "The Cavalry" (official story: She singlehandedly took down a superhuman villain and their entire army of henchmen) and why is she so cold and mysterious about it?
The answer and more (SPOILERS!) after the jump...
So, the idea that something a lot darker than "just" a rescue went down with May in Bahrain has been a given since they decided not to reveal it right away; but the actual reveal (she actually only took out two henchmen, the rest were killed by their own master - a pre-teen girl Inhuman who'd transformed without authorization from... whoever is making that call - that May was forced to kill) was a lot darker than AGENTS is usually prepared to go, so that's interesting in itself.
Interesting enough, in fact, that it probably could've stood to be it's own story. Weaving it into Skye bonding with Jaioying works narratively, but it also ends up giving away the twist too easily: "Gee, I wonder if May's story will somehow pay off in a way the ties-in with the 'not every Inhuman should transition' infodump?" On the other hand, it feels wrong to criticize the show for wasting no time getting Skye to her "learning its your mother" moment so quickly when the lack of padding had been so praiseworthy all season - especially since I've also been watching through DAREDEVIL this week, which (while overall a solid series - review likely pending) is padded and stretched-out to the point of near absurdity at times.
Meanwhile, our new big piece of information is that Coulson actually does seem to have been secretly assembling what sounds like a personal army of superhumans, as part of something called "Theta Protocol." This is, apparently, where a bunch of S.H.I.E.L.D 2.0's money has gone, and the majority of the actual data is in the toolbox that just walked out the door with Fitz last week. Oh, and if you were guessing that Raina's complaint of constant nightmares was foreshadowing an Inhuman power for future-telling? Congratulations - you've seen a superhero show before.
Still, the "showpiece" for this episode was seeing Ming-Na Wen stretch her acting chops alongside her action work, and it delivered on that front - she turns in a hell of a performance that momentarily turns so "real" it almost feels out of place with all the broader genre-series business going on. There's only about 4 - 5 more of these left, and there's a lot of plot to tie up, so this might have been our last shot at a "character piece" episode before a sprint to the finish like last season. If so, it's a good note to transition on.
PARTING THOUGHTS:
- I missed it myself the first time, but Coulson has mentioned Theta Protocol once before - to the Koenigs, as an "if we don't come back" measure. So there's that.
- So what is Theta? At this point it could be anything, but it would be a weird coincidence for a S.H.I.E.L.D spin-off to be announced the same week we start hearing "our main character might be building a training-camp for superhumans" as a plot point. SECRET AVENGERS?
- Piggy-backing on that: Remember, CAPTAIN AMERICA: CIVIL WAR *is* apparently going to still be about the government trying to regulate powered persons, so it'd be convenient to have a whole bunch of them ready to go.
- An exchange between Gordon and Lincoln suggests that there's some tension between the human-looking and non-human-looking Inhumans. Seems a bit late to bring that up.
NEXT WEEK:
The ads are acting like "Frenemy of My Enemy" is an AGE OF ULTRON tie-in, but I'm a bit skeptical - there's at least one more episode between this and the film's U.S. release, and other than the still sought-after Dr. List the prospect of a WINTER SOLDIER-level tie-in seems unlikely from a logistical perspective.
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