You see, there’s a scene in [Charlie's Angels] that tormented me, that kept me up at night, and that lately has had me interrogating a wide variety of seemingly devoted, and certainly well-compensated, filmmaking professionals. That’s because the bird in Charlie’s Angels is, I believe, the wrongest bird in the history of cinema—and one of the weirdest and most inexplicable flubs in any movie I can remember. It is elaborately, even ornately wrong. It has haunted not just me but, as I’d later learn, the birding community at large for almost a quarter of a century.
Figured I should write a post about this movie before I go see the next one.
Short Preamble About The Box Office
…I’m so surprised this didn’t make more. It got much better reviews than Brave New World, but last I checked, it made about the same amount?
This more than anything has made me think these films are reaching a General MCU Audience. People aren’t thinking “does this individual film/premise/team/audience reaction sound good,” they’re thinking “am I the kind of person who goes to see every Marvel movie in theaters, or am I not?” And the pool of reliable-Marvel-moviegoers has only been shrinking over the past five years.
When The Marvels got a lukewarm response, it could’ve been any combination of racism, sexism, and the strike disrupting their usual promo tours. (The movie itself was excellent. None of the criticisms that people held up as Terrible Flaws ever made sense.) And when BNW got a lukewarm response, it could’ve been because the movie itself was Just Okay.
But Thunderbolts is another genuinely excellent movie! And it has multiple white guys in leading roles! So what gives?
I really wish this had come out years ago. Should’ve been the big team-up finale of Phase 4. Instead, in the meantime, the MCU burned a bunch of its regular viewers by making them sit through hot messes like Quantumania or MoM, and now even the real gems aren’t bringing them back.
Spoiler-Lite Actual Reaction
It’s good!
And specifically, it’s good in ways that cater to transformative media fandom, which you’d think would be a gift. The main characters are a Sad Blorbo Variety Pack. All of them are murderers with tragic backstories, mostly involving kidnapping and/or brainwashing. One has the extra burden of dealing with her overenthusiastic cringe dad, who is also a murderer with a tragic backstory. Everyone is trained in all kinds of cool deadly fighting styles, but completely incompetent at making friends. The premise is about forcing them to work together! The villains are “the embodiment of Gaslight Gatekeep Girlboss” and “a floppy-haired man with a stutter and sweater paws who just wants to be a hero.” Everyone has a traumatic childhood and everyone needs a hug. A critical plot point hinges on how desperately they all need a hug!
It’s one of those movies with a big cast, and almost all of them started as secondary characters in somebody else’s movie/TV show — but the writing does a great job of re-introducing them, giving you regular tidibts of exposition and recap, in ways that fit organically with the banter the characters would be doing anyway. Bucky is a bit of an outlier — he’s the most well-established character here, they expect you to basically know what his deal is, they only drop enough tidbits to jog your memory. Based on audience reaction, I think that was the right call.
(This is the movie where he’s in Congress. They don’t even try to explain how or why he ran for Congress. He’s just kinda…there. He’s not good at it, he’s visibly not enjoying it, but he sure is there! You just have to go “I Guess???” and roll with it.)
There was one character who, based on the previews, everyone figured was going to die early on. They do, in fact, die early on. If you were personally invested in that character, and excited to see them get more screen time, that sucks. But in general…I do think it was a good writing choice. It’s not a cheap shock-value death! It fits right in with the plot and the themes! It’s “these characters are career assassins, any one of them could’ve gone out that quickly if they had a bad day, is it any wonder they’re all depressed nihilists right now?”
A lot of the plot is about MCU version of Sentry, whose comics backstory is basically a version of what the MCU did with Spider-Man in No Way Home: “he used to be friends with a bunch of the Avengers and personally involved in a ton of world-changing events, but then, for the safety of the universe, his whole existence had to be erased from everyone’s memories.” I’d love to see the version of the movie where MCU Sentry had that backstory too. It could’ve been so fun to see “a montage of pivotal scenes from Phases 1 through 3, now with this random new guy photoshopped in.” And think of all the novel-length “Sentry’s adventures as a critical part of the last 20 movies” fic epics it would’ve inspired.
On the other hand, I get why they didn’t want to just rehash NWH. And I do really like what they came up with instead. The characterization is well-rounded and compelling, the designs for his different forms/powers are original and striking. A big part of his deal is that he’s Cartoonishly Unbeatably Strong, which makes it all the better that they shake up the Marvel “big CGI-heavy final battle” formula, so the win has nothing to do with “who can hit the hardest.”
Between all the different team members, my favorite dynamic is Yelena and Bucky. They never say out loud “so, how ’bout that life as the childhood friend of an OG Avenger, whose iconic heroism you could never possibly live up to even if you didn’t spend all that time as a brainwashed tool of the supervillains, huh?”, but they bring this low-key sense of mutual understanding to all their conversations. Yelena settles naturally into a team-leader role over the course of the movie, while Bucky has the most experience being on a team of Actual Superheroes, which he translates into “advising Yelena about management stuff” in this quietly-supportive way. It’s great.
I know Marvel has a really spotty record of having characters stay friends/partners/teammates from one installment to the next…but I really hope the Thunderbolts (or whatever name they manage to hang onto in the future) stick together for another one.
To despise your government To distrust your government To be unable to respect your government To know the leader of your country has contempt for the people of your country To be angered not because it’s “Not in my name” but because it IS in my name
First we've got Bride of Chaotica!, in which Kate Mulgrew enthusiastically chews the scenery. Mmm! Part of a balanced breakfast!
Also, she's pretty judgey about Tom's extracurriculars. E remarked that her daily coinflip must've landed on "Mom", and I can't say she's wrong.
It's a fun breather episode so long as you forget the fact that dozens of photonic aliens died before anybody on Voyager even realized they were at war. Whoops! Also, they spend almost the entire episode mere inches away from a shipwide epidemic of some sort of gross gastrointestinal illness, but nobody seems to care about that either, it's all played for laughs.
Then this episode I completely forgot where Tuvok and Tom are crash-landed on a time displaced planet for several months or a year with a woman who is deeply crushing on Tuvok. Tom, for whatever weird reason of his own, is adamant that the correct course of action is for Tuvok to get in touch with his emotions and just go to bang city with this woman. E and I agreed that the actually correct and logical course of action was for Tuvok to give Tom that punch in the face that he is just begging for, but for some reason Tuvok refrained. Seriously, I have no idea what bug flew up Tom's butt this episode, but he was so fucking obnoxious for no reason at all. Maybe, Tom, you should get in touch with your emotions before you start lecturing the Vulcan about his. I genuinely have no idea what his deal was or was supposed to be.
this has been stated before by others but I guess this is why I tend to gravitate towards children's media with sketchy-at-best worldbuilding. If something's too well-thought-out then (while I might enjoy the experience of watching/playing it) there's no blank margins for me to play around in and that's what I'm looking for in a fandom.
Lowkey enough that I felt bad complaining about it, but bad enough that I couldn't focus and had to go to bed early, and then I slept through half of today as well and only woke when I got hungry enough.
How're you gonna send your "thoughts-and-prayers" email on Friday? At this point, silence would've been better. (I have no idea how I got on the mayor's email list.)
Speaking of the shooting, my aunt texted me to check in. She, uh, she called me by the name I tried out for like five minutes in middle school. I have no idea how she remembered that. I barely remember that. But at least she didn't ask after Mommy's health this time.
This should drop the temperature to something livable.
E and I watched three more Voyager episodes.
First, we watched the one where Tom Paris gets put in solitary for 30 days due to an environmental crime of conscience. Janeway flipped her morning coin and landed on "martinet / asshole", I guess. Tom tries pointing out that a month of solitary is cruel and unusual punishment, but nobody, least of all the writers, takes it seriously.
I take it seriously.This is literally torture. The worst thing that happens to Tom is he's bored and has a few nightmares about his astonishingly abusive father. (I thought the man was astonishingly abusive. I'll bet the writers thought he was just ordinary bad.) What happens to real people includes but is not limited to hallucinations, obsessive thoughts, a heightened risk of suicide, and lasting psychosis.
Anyway, the episode was surprisingly still topical, 30-ish years after the fact. The one moderately amusing part of this episode is where Tom tells the turbolift to bring him to the brig because nobody wanted to pay the security guard extras to speak. Great episode, but, to reiterate, solitary confinement is literally torture.
The next episode was Counterpoint, in which a fascist thug thinks he has culture, but actually he does not. They never do. Voyager is smuggling telepathic refugees. The fascists have some inane argument about how you can't trust telepaths and they're a real and present threat to society, but it's a weaksauce argument and nobody buys it. Outside the ship children are getting smuggled around in crates and incarcerated in concentration camps everywhere you look. This is another surprisingly, and dismayingly, topical episode.
At the end, Janeway is sad that the thug betrayed them instead of defecting for real, but that's because she thinks he's hot. I think she could've just kidnapped him. It worked with Seven, after all. (To be honest, there's a long list of one-episode characters that I think Janeway should've outright kidnapped. And also Seska and her baby.)
One of those refugee children shows up again on Prodigy as a Starfleet security guard and... honestly, I have so many questions about the way they apparently jaunt back and forth to the Delta Quadrant on a whim nowadays. Is this something they explain in Picard? Because I'm not watching Picard, not now that I've heard they kill off Icheb.
And today was a Robert Picardo Showcase Episode wherein the Doctor has a psychological crisis after finding out his memory was modified to make him forget his previous psychological crisis, when he chose to save his friend Harry over some random extra. It's a good episode. Don't ask me what Voyager planned to do if he never overcame his trauma and they had to go the rest of the trip with no doctor, though.
“Is My Blue Your Blue?” – a site that gives you increasingly-mixed shades of teal, making you sort them as Blue or Green, then tells you where your mental boundary of “green turns into blue at This Point” compares to the population in general.
Mine is “hue 173,” moderately on the green side, i.e. the Exact Midpoint (“turquoise”) counts as a shade of blue to me. Did the test on a family call, where we picked whichever color most people agreed on…and managed to land on True Neutral.
Where’s yours?
—
“The color “olo” can’t be found on a Pantone color chart. It can be experienced only in a cramped 9-by-13 room in Northern California. That small space, in a lab on the UC Berkeley campus, contains a large contraption of lenses and other hardware on a table. To see olo, you need to scootch up to the table, chomp down on a bite plate, and keep your head as steady as you can. A laser will be fired into one of your eyes, targeting more than a thousand of your cone cells. (The scientists will have mapped their location on your retina in advance.)”
What I wouldn’t give to get a look at this color. Doesn’t seem likely, though — apparently they’ve already gotten calls from a ton of interested artists, and the retinal mapping process is so involved, even the guy who named the color hasn’t gotten to see it yet.
(…Although the people who have seen it all describe it as some sort of teal. So maybe it’s not as unthinkable as it sounds like it should be.)
The fourth BnHA movie, taking place after the U.A. Traitor arc which places it sometime during the events of S07 of the anime, if I'm not mistaken. (Though anime movies tend to not really mesh with series timelines so I try not to get too fussed about continuity.)
If I were to condense this movie's story into one sentence, it'd be "A mafioso impersonates All Might and Deku was so offended by this that he decided to end this man's life."
It's a bit exaggerated, I'll admit—I highly doubt we'll get to see Deku go around murdering people—but the finale smackdown Deku unleashed on Gollini ... ( Some mild spoilers for the main series. )
The movie's plot is pretty standard but it has amazing animation in the bigger fight/action sequences. My favorite has to be when Giulio's fighting against Gollini. The moves are so fluid and pleasing to the eyeballs 😌 Second favorite is the big final fight between Deku, Bakugou, and Todoroki vs. Gollini. Dude had no chance whatsoever after ticking off All Might's top three overpowered fanboys.
My biggest takeaway from this movie is that Kirishima apparently has a long-lost older brother from Italy. You can't show me Giulio and expect me to not immediately think that he has some sort of connection to Kirishima. You can't.
Random stuff:
If I were a criminal in this universe, I would be so embarrassed to be caught by a high schooler. So embarrassed.
The fact that Iida says Bakugou's full gremlin hero name and then adds "-kun" at the end will never be not funny to me.
Is Italy going to send over some of their Pro Heroes to clean up this mess? These were their villains!
Moonpie started to get super hyped up, as usual, and so did they, so I picked her up... and ended up with two huskies eagerly jumping up on me to say hi to their best chihuahua friend!
Well, at least my feet were firmly planted. Before we saw the huskies, on our earlier walk, we bumped into a friendly yorkie (?) - no collar, no people. But well-fed and groomed, this isn't another Finn. He eventually disappeared under a fence, but I've been asking everybody I saw if they know whose dog he is exactly, because I was that worried. Was he outside alone in the heat? That's no good.
Anyway, I asked the guy with the huskies, and he had no idea, but he told me something else - the day before, he thinks he saw a fox! I'm not sure he wasn't just mistaken, but if he isn't - wow! I know we have bunnies on the South Shore, and coyotes in the Bronx, and whatever the city says we definitely have a full time population of deer mid-Island, so maybe a fox isn't so strange.
Anyone else who got Apple TV for Murderbot reasons, you’ve gotta catch Schmigadoon! before you go. (…It’s the only non-MB thing I’ve watched so far and thought “yes, this is such a treat, I need to tell people about it.”)
The premise is “what if a young professional couple got isekai’d into a musical?” Melissa and Josh are both doctors, their romance is struggling, they go on a couples-retreat hike in the woods…and they walk into a bright colorful town where everyone keeps singing at them.
(The title is a riff on Brigadoon, which is also about normal modern people stumbling into a fantastical small town, but the characters and songs pull from all over. Most of the s1 references I recognized were from The Sound of Music. Gonna indulge in this whole Youtube playlist of Musical Fans breaking down the references.)
At first, our heroes assume it’s some kind of immersive performance! Then they can’t get out of the town. And there’s a leprechaun. And the only way to leave is to achieve True Love, while helping the townsfolk with their own problems along the way. Through song, of course.
The cast is star-studded. (They got Kristen Chenowith! and Jane Krakowski! and Alan Cumming!) The music is amazing — it’s all based on songs from classic musicals, not in a straightforward “we took the original song and gave it new parody lyrics” way, but still in a “hang on, this is a riff on Do Re Mi, isn’t it” way. The writing has a lot of fun with the tropes and the cheesiness of the source material, but the kind where you can tell they have a lot of genuine love and affection for it.
It’s barely a spoiler to say that, yeah, our heroes find True Love by the end of season 1. But after leaving Schmigadoon, they start missing it, and go back to the woods to see if they can find it again…and season 2 has them stumbling into the darker, grittier spectacle of Schmicago.
Now here I got a lot more of the references. (Chicago, obviously — then there’s some Sweeney Todd, some Godspell, some Annie, just a touch of Jesus Christ Superstar, and a delightful sprinkle of Rocky Horror.)
The show got canceled after S2. At least the writers were thoughtful enough to leave us on a hopeful/closure ending instead of a cliffhanger! But it’s a little bit tragic that we’ll never get to see Josh and Mel fumble their way through their custom mashup of Little Shop of Horrors, RENT, Wicked, Avenue Q, The Book of Mormon, and Fun Home.
Did you like the “normal cynical people dealing with a fantastical world of colorful joy” aspect of The Good Place? Were you into the “affectionate parody where we put our whole hearts into writing original music” vibe of Galavant? (Another musical-comedy that was canceled much too soon.) Are you a fan of any/all of the musicals I’ve name-checked so far? Then you should go check out Schmigadoon.
(There’s a nonzero chance that, after I get through all the reference-explaining videos, I’ll go back and watch the whole thing again.)
(The comment is a few years old and gave a few more details in the thread that read to me like they were a teen or young adult when they wrote it, so to protect their identity I'm linking to a different lyrics video of the same song. But seriously, there's a level of stupidity that can't be entirely excused by youth.)
So, there was the one where Naomi Wildman's mother doesn't die but we never see her again, which is kinda weak as episodes go but which does set up Naomi becoming Seven's little duckling.
We skipped the ice episode - I mean, it's a great episode, I just wasn't feeling it - and went on to Seven's multiple personality episode, or as I call it, "Jeri Ryan is an amazing actress". Like, wow.
This is another episode in which the crew has seemingly forgotten the concept of diplomacy. Okay, you have a Borg device with a computer virus that kills lots of Borg. The people who invented the thing obviously want it put back in space, intact, so it can kill even more Borg. You don't want to do that until you've cured Seven - great, wonderful. Have you considered asking them if there is anything they might accept in trade? Like, I don't know, information about the Borg? They only met the menace four years ago! Sure, they've made remarkable strides in killing them since them, but they'd surely like to know more about your novel approach of deborgifying the drones? They could get some of their own people back if they tried that approach, and that'd surely be better than killing them all? More information so they could pursue multiple goals can only be a good thing, especially as the Borg are bound to adapt to any one approach sooner or later.
But no, nobody even suggests it. Geez, these people. (And also? Maybe information on this virus would've been a good thing to trade for. You don't need people to sacrifice themselves. If the virus is nonfatal but persistent you can just infect people prophylacticly and hope for the... uh, best? Worst? You can hope that if the worst ever happens, at least you'll take some Borg out with you.)
And we wrapped up with the episode in which the Doctor creates a holographic Cardassian war criminal as a medical expert with whom to confer. So-so writing, honestly - the themes deserved better, and it's only saved by the acting.
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tropicsbear
The fourth BnHA movie, taking place after the U.A. Traitor arc which places it sometime during the events of S07 of the anime, if I'm not mistaken. (Though anime movies tend to not really mesh with series timelines so I try not to get too fussed about continuity.)
