Fantastic Four: First Steps, Wut I Thunk

I'm a sucker for retro-futurism, and that's probably the best thing about this film.  No spandex, just wool!  Performances are fine except for the huge bad guy Galactus, who literally says almost nothing other than he's hungry for planets.  Johnny Storm is kind of the dumb lady's man, but a twist in the plot gives him a little more credit for having some brains.

The real question is, in 2025 are superhero movies still something worth watching?  I'd say this is an above average Marvel product, although just that.  The Silver Surfer never really looks right -- too much CGI or too little I don't know.  Natasha Lyonne is criminally underused, as is her relationship with The Thing.

Three Clobberin' Times out of five!

Deadpool & Wolverine: What I Thunk

I find myself at a point in life where both my nerd tolerance and my meta-referential tolerance are both quite high.  But short of a Ph.D. in Fox versus Disney shenanigans this might not be the movie for you.  The performances are fine, the villain is iffy, but there are some laugh out loud moments amidst the carnage.

Probably a good place to stop both franchises.  Earned.  Done.  Go home Ryan Reynolds, you're drunk.

definitely not "all on acid"

"I visited the offices of Marvel Comics, and wrote my visit up for the LA Free Press.  It was almost as easy to visit the Marvel offices in 1966 as it had been to visit the Mad offices ten years earlier.  Flo Steinberg (although I didn't know at the time it was her) was sitting at the front desk, subbing for the receptionist who was on a break.  I told her the purpose of my visit.  She took one look at me -- I was wearing the shortest miniskirt in New York City -- went back to the bullpen and told them, 'You gotta see this.'

Stan Lee was nice to me.  Everybody was nice to me.  Roy Thomas showed me around the office and took me to lunch.  I took one look at the guys in the Marvel bullpen, with their pens and pocket protectors, and realized that they were definitely not 'all on acid.'  Later, in the subway, on my way back to Marty's, I ran into Marvel writer Denny O'Neil, the only guy in the Marvel office who had looked the least bit bohemian.  He told me that once he had worn a 'Legalize Pot' button to the Marvel offices, and Stan Lee had told him to take it off, please."

-- Trina Robbins, Last Girl Standing

This was a fantastic read by an artist who started off in the world of underground comics and later became the first female to work on the mainstream Wonder Woman series.  Along the way, she was a successful fashion designer (made dresses for Cass Elliot), a friend to many in the 60's counter-culture in New York, San Francisco, and L.A., slept with Jim Morrison (not surprisingly, he turned out to be a total jerk), and later in life, a breast cancer survivor.  Highly recommended!

The joke in this passage, if it isn't clear, was that the guys behind the cosmic weirdness of Doctor Strange and Fantastic Four (Jack Kirby, basically) must have been doing no small amount of hard drugs.  Turns out, they were basically squares.  Very talented and creative ones, no doubt.

Watchmen (The TV Series, With Spoilers!)

I tweeted out my feelings regarding the finale of Watchmen and I guess I'll replicate most of them here.

The final episode was good.  Visually, the series has been great all along.  Thematically, working race into the mythos has been rewarding, and the acting has also been good.

But the writing?  Not the dialogue, but specifically the world building and plot structure?  There are just a lot of things that didn't fly with me.

Off the top of my head, Sister Night seems way unmoved by the fact that so many of her fellow police officers were just murdered with frozen squid-creature babies.  While Doctor Trieu is problematic, why do we have to take Veidt's word that she'd not help save the world from war and global warming?  Why does it take until the last episode to remind us that we're supposed to care about Sister Night's three kids?  Why is Looking Glass still a nothingburger of a character?  Why does Laurie seem to not care that much that her dildo model / past boyfriend is being disintegrated?  In a series based on the white terrorism of the Tulsa race riots, why do we so quickly gloss over the inherent racism of a U.S. occupation of Vietnam?

I never watched Lost but I get the feeling if I had, I'd have many of the same feelings.  This show was the product of some amazing brain-storming sessions, no doubt.  There are great ideas here, but also mediocre and problematic ones.  But hey, let's throw everything together and see what sicks, coherency be damned.

In a TV world of endless seasons, and a movie world of endless sequels, you can get away with this but only for so long.  Then you get shit-canned, and all those "interesting" plot threads turn into a heap of unfulfilled pretension, overnight.

The last two episodes move the dial over into "interesting but heavily flawed, and not worthy of a second season" territory for me.  I'm glad I followed through with all nine episodes, because around episode five I honestly wondered whether I could be bothered to even finish watching the series.

Make of that what you will.

Yawn

Four episodes into a nine episode run, and I think I'm done with Watchmen.  Using the Tulsa white supremacy riots of 1921 as a backdrop offered an intriguing start, but it's been downhill since then.

Glancing around at various sci-fi review outlets I see that I'm in a distinct minority.  What they see as a slow and thoughtful reveal of facts just seems pretentious and dull to me.

More bluntly, I just don't like any of these people.  I don't understand what motivates any of them.  (Even as horrible as Rorscach and Ozymandias were in the comic book, you can at least understand why they do what they do.)

And given that we're almost at the halfway mark, it doesn't help that we're still introducing main characters.

Boo.

Watchmen, So Far -- With Spoilers

I'm absolutely flummoxed by the new Watchmen series.

It had an intriguing start, setting up a universe where the effects of the Tulsa white terrorism riots of 1921 would reckon with the events of the Watchmen comic series (1985).  Episode two was kind of dull.  Then episode three brings back a major character from the comic with little to no explanation of what's been going on for the past 35 years, other than that she's an ex-superhero who hates superheroes (or, properly, "vigilantes.")

I don't expect a good series to hold your hand at every turn, but I found myself scratching my head in sympathy for anybody who hasn't recently read the comic.  And no, seeing the Zak Snyder film (2009) only goes so far, because in the TV universe the "canon" ending has occurred, not the Snyder plot change.  (Spoiler: the comic ending saw the US and USSR reconcile, but only after the horrific death of half of New York City, as opposed to Snyder's "Doctor Manhattan is gonna kill us all we must be friends now!")

So I'll watch the rest.  I think.  I don't know.  The latest episode swayed quickly between pretentious and tedious.  It's hard to care about these characters when the whole series so far is premised on the fact that you've "done your homework," so to speak.

That's annoying.

And the big blue dildo thing wasn't clever, it was very stupid.  Silk Specter would have moved on by now.

The Boys -- What I Thunk Of It, With Spoilers

I liked it fine enough, but not nearly as much as a lot of critics and most of my nerdy friends did.  The set-up, via Heroes-As-Narcissistic-Politically-Motivated-Assholes?  Actually not that original, but still a cool idea!  The performances?  Mostly good, except for Karl Urban's inexplicable, terrible attempt at a cockney accent.  (Which I assumed a New Zealander wouldn't struggle with, but then again his dialogue was obviously written by an American high on bad Guy Ritchie movies.  That is, all of them.)

Things I did like?  Starlight's performance as the country-girl who quickly loses all illusions as to what's really going on.  (Apparently the source material is even more brutally rape-y.)  Homelander coming off not just as an arrogant jerk, but a truly psychopathic asshole.  A generally believable scenario where the interests of humanity are co-opted by corporate and government greed.

Things beyond Butcher's terrible lines that I didn't like?  I mean, I didn't hate The Deep's fish-out-of-water stuff (see what I did there?) but tonally, and even acknowledging a need for some comic relief, it felt like a different show.  And while the first half of the seasons sets up some interesting arcs, the second half seemed to want to generate ten new ones as bait for a second season.  (Something a lot of shows do these days, granted.)  And what about that terrorist super, The Captain?  Homelander flies all the way to Syria but doesn't confront the most pressing threat?  And the whole existential crisis of heroes being made, not "touched by God" or what have you?  Very under-cooked, especially with a sympathetic Christian character like Starlight.  And finally, why did Homelander kill the woman he's obviously, deeply, and creepily attached to as a Freudian mother-figure?

At the end of the day sure, I'll watch a second season.  But I'm not exactly dying for more.  I think people got swept up in the obvious excitement of the first few episodes and kind of let their critical guards down for some poor writing in the second half.

Spoiler Free Spiderman Review!

Spiderman: Far From Home was pretty good, but the plot felt a bit too complicated for a Spidey flick.  Tom Holland and Zendaya were great though, as were Jon Favreau and Marissa Tomei.  (Why isn't she in more stuff lately?)  The lazy first half was made up for by a much stronger second.

3.5/5 web shooters!