Category Archives: Superhero

Movie Review: The Marvels

Marvel Studios

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Marvel Cinematic Universe films come sin several flavors and tones, from the intensely personal and dramatic such as Captain America: Civil War, the thematically serious such as Black Panther and its critique of both colonialism and ethno-isolation, to the comedic and lighthearted such as Ant-Man. 2023’s The Marvels, while resenting world-ending threats for humanity, falls cleaning and intentionally into the light and comedic category.

As a side effect of a magical device entangles the power of Ms. Marvel, Kamala Khan (Iman Vellani), Captain Marvel (Brie Larson) and Captain Monica Rambeau (Teyonah Parris) the three women are forced into an oddball partnership to stop the murderous revenge rampage of Kree warrior Dar-Benn (Zawe Ashton) bitter from the fall out of Captain Marvel’s ending the Kree wars and domination depicted in the film Captain Marvel. Supporting characters include Nick Fury (Samuel L. Jackson) and Kamala’s immediate family introduced in the limited series Ms. Marvel.

The ‘mismatched partners’ is a classic genre of cinema and while that sort of story is often a two-hander, screenwriters Nia DaCosta, who also directs, Egan McDonnell, and Elissa Karaski juggled the competing needs of the ‘forced partner’ comedic tones with the serious world dying stakes that are often a requirement of superhero movies, and the family conflicts quite well. The Marvels is principally a comedy, one that finds its humor in familial relations, both blooded family and the found variety. Any doubts about the intentional comedic tone are dispelled by the tongue in cheek use of the song Memory from the musical Cats. The difficult problems of exposition dealing with characters entering the theatrical world who were created in the streaming series format is handled with quick amusing lines. (You got your powers walking through a witch’s hex? Yup.)

The cast is uniformly good and talented, handling the FX work and the comedic character beats with equal skill. The cinematography by Sean Bobbit is perfectly adequate capturing the sequences with enough flair to have some emotional impact but not quite reaches truly impressive levels.

While The Marvels will not reach the heights of becoming one of my favorite 5 MCU movies it is certainly well cemented in the upper half of this franchise and with a running time under two hours it makes for a pleasant and fun distraction.

The Marvels is currently playing in theaters and well worth the trip to see it on the impressive big screen.

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“Magical” Effects in ‘Soft’ Science Fiction

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‘Hard Science Fiction is the sub-genre where no detail contradicts the know laws of physics.  in this there is no faster than Light travel or communication or any form of telepathic psychic ability. It is a rigorous artform practiced by only a few. Once you diverge away from ‘Hard’ SF and into less rigorous applications of scientific fact and theory the art because far wider, encompassing everything from Star Trek the Marvel Cinematic Universe. Often at some point a piece will require some extraordinary effect that upends expectations, introducing new and often unreproducible effects. What is interesting is that in various historical periods there has often been a consensus on what can produce these transformative events.

In the first few decades of the 20th century ‘Rays’, light beyond the visible spectrum, were a common fantastical effect. In 1931’s Frankenstein, Victor boasts of discovering a ray beyond the violet and ultraviolet, a ray that first brought life and one which he harnesses to give life to his creation. In Captain America: The First Avenger is the writers tip their hat to Frankenstein and use a period appropriate ‘Vita Rays’ as per of the process that created Captain America.

By the post-war era ‘rays’ had become a tired trope and in the new atomic age ‘Radiation,’ which really were rays all along, because the empowering effect that grew insects and people to impossible proportions, created powerful mutant abilities, reanimated the dead to cannibalize the living, and endowed several comic book superheroes with the flashier abilities.

Radiation, like the rays before them, eventually passed out of favor as the magic system of less than demanding science fiction stories.

What replaced ‘radiation’ as our go to we need something fantastic to happen here effect?

Quantum Mechanics.

Quantum Mechanics, and in particular the many worlds interpretation of wave form collapse, had been used the furious wave hands and craft stories are in effect blatantly impossible. You want a ‘rational’ reason why the devil is in a jar of goo in the basement of a Los Angeles Catholic Church? Quantum Mechanics. You need a method of time travel to collect some shiny stones and reverse the villain’s victory? Quantum Mechanics. You want a musical episode where the characters react to diegetic musical and sing their truths? Quantum Mechanics.

Quantum Mechanics is no more likely to induce a ‘musical universe’ than gamma radiation is to transform a normal man into an eight-foot tall several hundred-pound monster. These are artifacts of very soft science-fiction employed to wave hands past the impossibility of it all in order to deploy the story the writers want to tell. As long as we remember that these stories are not reality, not a possible future, but the modern equivalent of ‘Once Upon A Time…’ then we can enjoy them for the myths that they are and remember that truth that matters in these stories is not the science but the emotions of the human condition.

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Series Review: Secret Invasion

Marvel Studios.

Thirty years after the events of Captain Marvel Nick Fury and Carol Danvers, now aware that the
shapeshifting Skrulls had been the oppressed and not the oppressors and had promised to find
the aliens a world to be their new home, it is revealed that the search for a home has failed and some Skrulls are intent on removing humanity from the Earth and taking it as their own. Secret Invasionfollows Nick Fury as he attempts to save the Earth and humanity from the rebel Skrulls and their genocidal plot.

While Secret Invasion did not actively repulse me as did some non-MCU series such as The Rigand Silo, it failed to engage or enthrall my attention and failed as an example of its subgenre the MCU rendition of a spy story.

Spy fiction exists along a spectrum with Ian Fleming’s super-spy James Bond, filled with gadgets, glamor, and megalomaniacal villains at one end and John le Carré’s George Smiley’s world of disloyalty, moral compromises, and cynicism at the other. Secret Invasion however seems to exist outside of the spectrum, playing closer to the superhero nature of its universe and ignoring the spy element of its central protagonist, Nick Fury. The series is neither the clear good vs evil romp that many Bond plots are nor does it delve beyond the surface concerning the moral costs and corruption of intelligence work. Without either element the series floats from set piece to set piece, each other its own escalating stakes but missing the essential tones that creates genre. This is not a failing due to due to the story being placed within the MCU, WandaVision embraced, exploited, and satirized the American sitcom genre while still exploring grief, destiny, and superpowers. Captain American: The Winter Soldier, while remaining an extension of Steve Rodgers’s MCU journey, captured the paranoia and feel of a 70s political thriller. Secret Invasion’s failure at genre leaves it lackluster and pointless, serving only to setup other franchise entries and having no essential reason for its own existence.

In addition to its failing as a spy genre Secret Invasion also presented plot inconsistencies that undermine the show’s suspension of disbelief. For 30 years Captain Marvel and Fury has searched for a new home for the Skrull population and failed to find a single planet for them. Really? In a universe as teaming with life among the star, see all the aliens represented in Guardians of the Galaxyfranchise, which also posits that there are abandoned habitable worlds, the failure to discover a place for the Skrulls becomes a leap of logic too great for a setting that includes magic and talking trees.

For a story about shapeshifting aliens and a secret world-wide threat, Secret Invasion does so little with this element that it is utterly lacking in paranoia. The story doesn’t utilize the concept that everyone is suspect because anyone might be the worst person to interact with. Bond usually had the ‘bad Bond girl,’ le Carré is rife with ‘who can you trust?’ issues but Secret Invasion rarely employs such a rich plot point and when it does it lacks any real weight.

Secret Invasion is not bad, but neither it is good. Of the newest television series, I have added to my recent watching it is the least interesting. I do not regret the time I spent with the series, but I shall not be looking to experience it again as I did with Loki or WandaVision.

A gentle reminder that I have my own SF novel available from any bookseller. Vulcan’s Forge is about the final human colony, one that attempt to live by the social standard of 1950s America and the sole surviving outpost following Earth’s destruction. Jason Kessler doesn’t fit into the repressive 50s social constraints, and he desire for a more libertine lifestyle leads him into conspiracies and crime.

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Movie Review: Sisu

Subzero Film Entertainment Stage 6 Films Good Chaos

 

The words Sisu is Finnish and denotes a grim determination in the face of overwhelming odds. It combines stoicism, perseverance, and making the most of limited resources to struggle to the very end without surrender. Developed as a concept during Finland’s 1939 bitter war with the Soviet Union it has become an element, a proud one, of the Finns national character.

Sisu is also a 2023 Finnish action movie now playing in theaters.

Set in the Lapland region of Finland during the closing months of the world war II, Sisufollows Aatami Korpi (Jorma Tommila) a former Finnish special forces commando and now gold prospector. Having discovered a ludicrously rich vein of gold Korpi is beset by retreating Nazi soldiers evacuating to Norway following Finland’s separate peace with the USSR. Naturally the Nazis attempt to steal the gold and murder Korpi and his little dog sparking an hour and a half of bloody, gory, revenge, (Don’t fret the dog is fine.) as Korpi slaughters Nazis and frees women that they have taken as sex slaves.

Despite the gore, the dismembered limbs, the clouds of blood from exploding Nazis I describe Sisu as cartoonish violence. This is not a feature you attend with an eye towards realism. Reality visited screenwriter and director Jalmari Helander, glanced at the script in progress, and took its leave. At no point in the movie did I have the slightest doubt to Korpi’s eventual triumph. It simply isn’t that kind of flick. This is a movie where you leave your higher logical functions at home and revel in the inventive slaughtering of fascists. If you have a delicate stomach or suspension of disbelief, then this movie is not for you.

Helander directs Sisu with a firm solid hand aided by cinematographer Kjell Lagerroos’ stark yet beautiful capturing of Lapland’s desolate beauty.

Sisu is not for everyone but for those that it is for it should strike a very pleasant nerve.

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Spooky Movie #6: Werewolf by Night

 

Marvel comics has a history stretching back the 60s. In those decades of world building and market chasing as part of their unified universe of heroes and villains the have explored every genre of storytelling including horror. With the Disney + release of Werewolf by Night they bring horror into the Marvel Cinematic Universe.

Werewolf by Night is helmed by first time director Michael Giacchino, though he is best known as a film score composer whose works include the fanfare that plays with the Marvel Studios logo. Written by Heather Quinn and Peter Cameron the Disney + special follows a group of ‘monster hunters’ gathered to compete to claim a powerful artifact, the Bloodstone. A monster ‘unlike any that they have face before’ has been released onto the grounds of a grand estate with the bloodstone imbedded into it. To win a hunter must not only best the beast and claim the stone but also survive the other hunters.

Presented in black-and-white to invoke the sensation of classic Universal horror, and to mitigate the blood splattered violence, the just under an hour special does a fine job of capturing a mood and atmosphere that plays well for fans of cinematic horror. The filmmakers carried their ‘old school’ presentation to entertaining ends with the inclusion of ‘cue marks.’ These are dark or white ovals that flash in the upper righthand corner of the frame to alert projectionist that a reel change was nearing and to prep the second projector. Even in the mid 1980s when I worked in a local movie theater the cue marks had passed out of relevance as the film projectors massive platters that contained the entire film on a single reel.

Aside from a title card with silhouettes of the Avengers there is no direct reference to other characters of the MCU though the production is officially a part of the franchise and introduces comic characters to this aspect of the Marvel universe.

Werewolf by Night is a fun, slightly scary, entry into the MCU and well worth the less than an hour it takes to view. An excellent episode to watch during this season.

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The Unlearned Lesson of Black Panther

2018’s Black Panther, written by Ryan Coogler and Joe Robert Cole, and directed by Coogler, was Marvel’s expansion in Afrofuturism exploring a mythical African kingdom, Wakanda, with incredibly advanced comic-book technology and wholly untouched by historical colonialism. An incredible box office success Black Panther gave a new myth to millions around the world while exploring the theme that isolationism, both for individuals and nations, solves no problems but merely leaves them to fester and grow. Its lesson that through interconnectedness can we heal the harms of the past is a valuable one.

However, there is another lesson in the plot of the film that none of the characters learned or even took note of its existence.

(Some spoilers follow)

After Erik “Killmonger” Stevens (Michael B. Jordan) defeats T’Challa (Chadwick Boseman) in ritual combat and claims the throne of Wakanda as his own he launches a campaign to wage war on the rest of the world seeking to ‘liberate’ the African diaspora around the globe. (I place ‘liberate’ in quote because his statement that ‘the sun will never set on the Wakandan Empire’ makes clear not only the historical analogy that he has become the colonizers he so despises but that liberty’ is far from his goal.)

Despite the Wakandan royal court knowledge that this will lead to millions upon millions of deaths around the world King Killmonger’s plan is put into immediate action. The King of Wakanda is an absolute monarch, ruling by decree and without any limitation.

T’Challa and the other heroes of the tale foil Killmonger’s plan for a global war and return the film’s protagonist to the throne.

But there is no hint in this film or the ones that followed in the Marvel Cinematic Universe, that the Wakandans even took notice that an absolute monarch is a plan for disaster.

Never create a political power you aren’t willing to see in the hands of your enemy.

There are other kingdoms in the marvel Universe, the films have already introduced us to Asgard, and it certainly looks like the sequel to Black Panther will introduce thew kingdom of Atlantis and it is doubtful that either will see limitations of the king’s authority, but Wakanda and Black Panther is different than those other stories and settings. Black Panther is a commentary on the real world, real history, and real evil that was visited upon the African continent. While superheroes with their magical and physics defying powers are modern fairytales and myth if you make such a direct and applicable statement on modern political systems and power then ignoring the dangers of absolute monarchy, of too much power concentrated into one person hands, is a disservice.

The unlearned lesson of Black Panther is power must be distributed and checked or will eventually be abused.

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Series Review: Ms. Marvel

Disney plus this week completed its latest MCU limited series Ms. Marvel. The shows centers on Kamala Khan, a 1st generation Pakistani-American high school student, her friends, family, and obsession with the MCU’s real-life superheroes, particularly Carol Danvers AKA Captain Marvel. When a mysterious artifact from her grandmother unlocks hidden powers within Kamala, she is thrust into a conflict that will set her against agents of the government, extra-dimensional beings, and that will propel her back the traumatic partition of India.

Iman Vellani does a good job portraying Kamala Khan which just the right balance of immaturity appropriate for a teenager but with potential that should bloom as she matures. The multi-ethic cast overall is well portrayed with the diversity within the Islamic faith is displayed without being shoved into a spotlight like a lecture.

Ms. Marvel’s tone is light with an emphasis on comedy but not fully goofy, but rather a character-based humor with just enough stakes to give the series some dramatic heft.

What appears to be the central threat and conflict is actually dealt with in the penultimate episode leaving the finale for a different and not entirely satisfactory complication. That said over all I enjoyed the series, while it was not a bold as Loki nor as experimental as WandaVision the show was entertaining, well written and acted and presented a likeable main character that was easy to empathize with.

Mild Spoiler Follows

IN the final episode Marvel Studios used the series as an opportunity to introduce a long-awaited fan addition to the MCU — mutants, complete with a musical cue from the 90s animated X-Men series.

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I’m Back

So, I have been busy these last two weeks looking after my sweetie-wife following her surgery. Everything went very well and today I am returning to my day job. I am also returning to, hopefully, regular updates to this blog and back to my writing.

Here are a few thoughts on recent shows but not full deep dives.

Star Trek: Strange New Worlds

Following the adventures of Captain Christopher Pike, commanding officer of the Enterprisebefore Kirk, this series seems to have found the right balance between honoring the past and original series while striking out for new territory with new characters and fresh takes on old ones. I am particularly enamored with Jess Bush and her take on the underutilized character Nurse Christine Chapel. There are breaks with canon but so far these have created new and compelling storylines that justify the rupture.

Ms. Marvel

The latest MCU series to debut on Disney+ Ms., Marvel follows the life of Kamala Khan a Pakistani-American highschooler and devoted Captain Marvel fan as she navigates life in the MCU, her Muslim family and neighborhood, with varying levels of devoutness, and her sudden and inexplicable acquisition of superpowers. The show’s style is vibrant, energetic, and exploding with energy, much like the life of a teenage while neatly balancing the fantastic with the reality of modern life for a character caught between tradition and the wider American culture.

I have very little actual knowledge of Muslim-American culture, and less that would apply to the specifics of being Pakistani-American teenage girl, but the show feels honest and respectful giving me an insight I have not before possessed. Well worth the watch.

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Movie Review (Spoiler Free): Doctor Strange in The Multiverse of Madness

Six years, and after several appearances in other franchise properties, Doctor Strange has its the sequel in Doctor Strange in The Multiverse of Madness (MOM).

Stephen Strange (Benedict Cumberbatch), master of the mystic arts, grappling with lost years dues to snapture (Hat tip to NPR’s Glenn Weldon for that) and lost loves as Christine Palmer (Rachel McAdams) marries another is drawn into a multi-universal threat rescuing a teenage, America Chavez (Xochitl Gomez), witchcraft summoned demons intent of capturing the young

Disney Pictures

woman for their master’s plan. Recognizing that this is witchcraft and not sorcery Strange seeks out Wanda Maximoff (Elizabeth Olsen) for assistance kicking off a chase across parallel universes, cameos from Marvel characters yet established in the MCU’s cannon and director’s Raimi’s long-time collaborator Bruce Campbell, with homages to their cult classic The Evil Dead, climaxing in CGI saturated battles but with a resolution that ultimately turns on seeing oneself as you truly are rather than how you think you are.

MOM is not the worst MVU films to play the silver screen, but neither is it the best. While heavy handed with some exposition it doesn’t fully its narrative momentum in the second act as did Eternals nor is it as light in character drama as The Incredible Hulk, but Strange’s emotional arc is flat, nearly absent, and with minor script changes that could have been corrected without signification plot deviations. Newcomer Xochitl Gomez does an impressive job holding her own in the presence of such acting talents as Cumberbatch, Olsen, and the film’s other Benedict, Wong, selling her character’s emotional truth without big expansive expressive displays

That said the film’s MVP actor is Elizabeth Olsen. In addition to playing variants of her character she excelled as the displaying depths for these individuals, giving a natural realism that penetrated the plots incredible nature and the CGI’s attempts to steal attention with spectacle. While Strange’s name is in the title the film is really her and I do wonder what viewers who have not seen WanaVision, whose theme composer Danny Elfman slipped into the score, made of Wanda’s principal motivation?

I did find the visual effects not quite on target, but I do not think it was primarily a failure of good rendering or models but rather the final composting left a disquieting disconnect to the varies elements harming the verisimilitude.

Overall, I would rank this MCU entry in the 3rd quarter with about half of the franchise better than and about a quarter not as good.

Doctor Strange in The Multiverse of Madness is currently playing theatrically.

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My Upcoming Geeky Artistic Weekend

Which artistically is starting tonight, Thursday.

Tonight, I plan to go out and see the foreign language Finnish horror film Hatching before it vanishes from theaters in my area. (I must admit I adore my AMC A-List subscription that makes rolling the dice on movie so much easier.)

Also tonight is Star Trek: Strange New Worlds. My sweetie-wife and I will be giving the series a try. Now, I’ll confess that lately the trek shows have not been working for me but hope springs eternal.

Saturday evening I plan to venture to San Diego’s Balboa Park for more experiments in night photography. Last weekend when I left the secret morgue I spied the California Tower lit by colored lights and thought it would be a good subject for my meager photographic skills.

Sunday morning my sweetie-wife and I will go out and catch the new Doctor Stranger movie.

All in all I am looking forward to this weekend.

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