Pop Culture is Dead to Me - part something of many

Our TV has, since my last entry, been thin on the ground; or I've forsaken this usual format of discussing TV and film by going into a longer format, but there's a wee bit to cover here.

Ozark has finished and after an absolute rollercoaster of a ride for 3½ seasons, it was all kind of underwhelming. I had a good idea about how it could have ended, but that got shot to pieces in the final episode - literally and metaphorically. 

The thing that really hit home about the series is how, eventually, everything was run by women and the power drove them absolutely bat-shit crazy, in one way or another. Ultimately, it was a series about victims - a vast slew of victims, spread far and wide. Apart from the general disappointment of the final half season, it did leave you thinking that these were just the first victims and there will many more to come in the fictional world of the Byrdes. 

Overall, I'd recommend this as a 5-star entry into the must-watch box-sets. We watched it all over the space of six to eight weeks and it is best watched like that, in blocks with a break for a few days. 

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There is isn't much I want to say about Fear the Walking Dead apart from - for the love of all that's sacred, stop it now!

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And following on from that sentiment, just what was the purpose of Picard season 2? The trailers made it look like a reworking of ST: The Voyage Home with added Borg and it ended up being a load of sentimental old shite. 

Coming off the back of the absolute pile of wank that Disco Very has become/always was [delete as necessary], we hoped that Picard would at least live up to its hype and be a jaunt around time, like the much-loved episodes of Next Generation, but instead we got a jelly mould stuffed full of ick. 

By the time we got to the last few episodes, I was doing it out of some misplaced loyalty and the wife was knitting. I've heard a rumour there will be a third and final series, reuniting the NextGen cast. I hope there isn't.

So, not knowing when we're beaten, I said, "Do you fancy watching ST: Strange New Worlds?" to the wife and she said, 'If we have to,' and I fell asleep three times in the opening 30 minutes, didn't really have a clue what was going on in the last 15 minutes and decided we wouldn't bother with it ever again, ever.

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Jodie Whitaker's penultimate Doctor Who caper came and went in a flurry of what the actual fuck? Moffatt's end can't come too soon and Whitaker is now as annoying as I can imagine Sylvester McCoy became to certain Whovian factions. It's just worse than awful.

I don't know who this new Doctor is, I'm happy, but slightly bemused, that he's black. Yes, it's absolutely time for a black Doctor, and I know we've already got one - a black one - but I feel we needed at least another woman so Whitaker didn't look like a nod to tokenism. I hope whoever replaces Gatwa will be another woman - a ginger woman - otherwise it loses something and frankly it can't afford to lose much more...

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I went into relative length about Moon Knight in another blog and have already given you my thoughts on Ms Marvel, which lands in less than a month and yet there has still only been two definitive trailers and neither was greeted with overwhelming positivity. I'm wondering about the viability of the MCU TV brand at the moment. We have some interesting things on the horizon, but something has to be pretty good for it to get out of this downward spiral of interest. Hawkeye is 'unlikely' to get a second series due to poor take up on it among Disney+ subscribers. I really think Loki's getting one because it ties into the build-up of Kang the Conqueror being the next big bad. Yes, I know he [Kang] is next scheduled to appear in the third Ant-Man film, which isn't the most auspicious of big screen debuts, but there's method in this madness. An old comic ploy of having an important character turn up in an unimportant comic book.

Kang will ultimately be the Thanos from 2024 to whatever conclusion they reach in and around 2027, probably with a fifth Avengers film. The multiverse isn't a McGuffin, it will play a central role in stories and will ultimately be the reset button Marvel will need to effectively reboot again in 2030. That is if they're still a viable product...

Marvel's problem, and I say this having read many reviews of Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness, some with spoilers, which I'm really not bothered about, was whatever Marvel did after Endgame they were onto a hiding to nothing, so whatever they turn out that makes money there's going to be the whiff of triumph. I expect the aforementioned film will end up being an interesting but somehow empty experience, or I might really like it. I have to say that I forecast in these blogs who the villain of the film would be two years ago and I was spot on; it was the most signposted thing ever.

I hypothesised somewhere else, in a different medium, how I would have solved the problem had I been Kevin Feige and I've made a few tweaks to it to share here:

The contractual obligation of certain films after Endgame obviously had to be addressed, however a more sensible approach to launch the next phase of Marvel films might have been not to have an Eternals film, but to have had a Captain Britain film instead!

I know the Eternals was a stepping stone to the next galactic adventure/story and doesn't really touch on the Multiverse, but had it instead been a film about Captain Britain and specifically how he's the Captain Britain of Earth #whatever and he's called into action to help prevent a multiverse-spanning villain called Mad Jim Jaspers from destroying the fabric of space and time, then it might have been an absolute stonker. Imagine the fun you could have with Jaspers causing a warp across the multiverse allowing things to wander in to worlds they don't belong, or that he is going from one to another changing them into his image. He is able to do this because he has already created the ultimate superhero killing machine, the Fury, who wipes out all resistance in the wake of Mad Jim. Imagine that?

In my idea, our Captain and a team of other heroes (Black Knight, some others known, some not) manage to vanquish the Fury after it decides that its creator - Jaspers - is a bigger threat than the heroes it was programmed to despatch and as a result the world is subsequently changed... Except, here's the sting in the tail and the thing that Marvel could have done and really shook things up; throughout the film, you get the impression that it's set in the no-too-distant past, possibly around the turn of the century. There are very few indications when it's actually set, but at the conclusion, those watching will see the events of the film took place in 1989. Was this the MCU or a story from another multiverse? 

Yes, it's essentially Alan Moore and Alan Davis's story that ran through a number of Marvel UK comics in the 1980s, but it's an almost perfect story to change everything but leave it essentially the same. It introduces you to a different aspect of the multiverse - a champion for each level - and concludes with the warp having affected the MCU. What were the Warpies in the comic become Muties - mutants.

Then, when Kang comes along and starts manipulating time, because that's what he does, you have a doorway into aging your new generation of muties, possibly by something he does that merges the two realities.

You can still have your multiverses of madness and your No Way Homes, but instead of some magically contrived method of making it happen, you have a physical entity explaining it and why, and introduce some new characters to the MCU without a) it feeling slightly forced in the wake of Endgame and b) you give everything else a common thread even if people choose not to watch other films or TV.

It would have given Marvel an easier way into doing films that don't appease the die-hard superhero fans because they could sew Easter eggs throughout the films, which wouldn't detract from the casual viewers enjoyment (or lack of) but would give them something to rant about on YouTube for a few months. 

But they didn't and we're left with something that resembles Marvel Comics in the 1970s. I now think of the MCU films as everything up to Endgame was before Marvel increased their cover price to 20¢ - circa 1970 - and everything after doesn't seem to have the same... feel. There's some people out there around my age who will understand that analogy, for those of you that don't; when Marvel increased the cover from from 15¢ they also redesigned the entire cover, with a jazzed up 1970s feel, which I now look back at and wish they'd never changed. I don't dislike the 1970s redesign; it's classic, but it felt strange because the content seemed to change; it seemed to become smaller, less rich. It felt more contained, which is why I look at pre-1970 comics with more of a fondness than any other era. The films feel a little like that; like one era has ended and the next one isn't quite my cup of tea.

They're not making them for me, but they do need repeat audiences and if you're going to have another sprawling Thanos-linked type story, at least make it coherent from the start; this isn't a TV series, despite some of the obvious connections. I sense an air of trepidation around Thor: Love & Thunder, like it needs to be both a massive hit and get things on some kind of track.

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However much I might hypothesise about the MCU, it is absolute Shakespeare compared to Sony's extended Spider-verse. Having sat through the 96 minutes of Morbius wondering why they even made it, all I can think is that some day soon, Sony's utter horse shit comics film making will cease and we will not be subjected to them again.

To be fair, this wasn't the utter shite I expected it to be, it was actually a whole different load of shite with substandard, fuzzy and almost unintelligible special effects. Jared Leto really can't act and someone should realise this very soon. Matt Smith makes a Matt Smith-like villain and these films could really do with script writers who can, you know, write, preferably stories that make sense.

The 'thinly-veiled' multiverse reference/allowance/made-no-common-sense-bit at the end just posed more questions no one wants answered and leaves you wondering if Sony will be allowed to play with the actual Spider-Man and if they can or do, how will they be able to look themselves in the mirror in the morning... 

And this on the back of the second Venom film, which felt more like a dark and broody remake of The Mask than a realised feature film. The Sony Spider-verse films - with the animated one as the exception to the rule - all feel a little as though they're there to cash in on a tenuous link rather than with any artistic conscience. Looking ahead at planned features and given the quality of those so far, one has to wonder why they're even considering it.

The Sony Marvel franchise is simply defiling the already waning name of superhero films.

Pop Culture: Moon Knight Review

Forgive me for being childish but I started to refer to Moon Knight as Poo Knight or Moon Poo after about three episodes of the six - I wasn't impressed. Now it's finished I'm left in a state of perplexity - should I just give up on Marvel/Disney+ because I'm simply spending more time moaning about their output than I am enjoying it?

Moon Poo is essentially an adult superhero story told through the U rated Disney filter and really seemed to miss the point. For starters, out of six 45 minute episodes, Poo Knight appears for about 7 minutes; we get almost all of Oscar Isaac showcasing his acting ability and his world renowned Frank Spencer impersonation, but very little of the actual superhero the series is named after. After a slow start this series simply stopped giving and clammed up like someone who had the runs and then took ten bottles of Imodium.

It looked BIG and splendid, full of Indiana Jones settings and a suitably dodgy villain, but it spent more time being confused and lurching from one Frank Spencer set piece to another and all the while the worst of the [violence] action was cut from the viewer; we just saw the aftermath. Imagine 45 minutes of a superhero show where all the superhero bits are cut out - that's Poo Knight.

Yes, it claimed to be focusing on split personalities and schizophrenia, but it didn't really; perhaps the mental health aspect was aimed at the viewer because you may feel cheated and bamboozled at the end of the show and want your money back - that is madness...

I want to spoil it for you, because I'm that disappointed by this and so many other Marvel/Disney+ TV shows. I want to tell you how it ends and what twists there were along the way, but I can't - not because I'm a decent person, because I'm not completely sure we saw a TV series or half a TV series where the other half is a secret that no one should see or know about. I'd like to spoil it for you so that you avoid wasting so much of your life waiting for something MCU to happen. Also I'd like to spoil it so you don't have to suffer two silly looking Egyptian gods having a stick fight metaphorically over Cairo (at least I think it was metaphoric, it might have actually happened) or about the hippo, who should have been some light comedy relief but was just a wee bit sinister and creepy.

I thought WandaVision was innovative and clever (and very obtuse); I really enjoyed Loki even though it didn't really do what I'd hoped it would and Hawkeye was okay - a kind of Avengers series without any of the proper Avengers in it - but it was spoiled by a wholly unsatisfactory ending and the introduction of a superpowered, lesser Kingpin (obviously not the same one from the Daredevil series given the way this one was far more Hulk-like with his strength), but they're knocking out as much wank as they are jewels. Like the MCU films since Endgame, nothing has grabbed me by the balls and teased me into arousal; they're just a bit boring, overwrought and absolutely not targeting a 60-year-old ex-Marvelite.

I think this might explain why I've been watching both the old MCU and non-MCU films again, because while some might not have been any good, there was an honesty about them sadly lacking from anything they do now.

Poo Knight or Moon Poo is a nadir. It promised so much, teased us with strangeness and ended up delivering a fantasy psychoanalysis of a character we didn't know anything about and was left not wishing to know anything more about. I struggle to see how this does anything for the Marvel/Disney line apart from further muddy waters that didn't need to be muddied.

Next up is Ms Marvel starting in June. The limited amount of previews available suggests to me that this is going to be a Marvel series that ties in directly with the forthcoming Marvels film but is firmly aimed at the pre-teen audience. Ms Marvel is going to be the most Disney of Marvel shows so far and that fills me with a lot of dread. Maybe it is time to call it a day with Marvel? 

Revisiting Any Old Films (part 1 of ?)

If nothing else, 2022 has so far been about nostalgia and revisiting the past, especially in terms of television and film. One thing I've learned is that my memories of films are often different from the reality or I forget huge swathes bookended by scenes that have stuck in my mind. I've always struggled to understand why people will watch films two or three times over the space of a year, preferring my tried and proven method of waiting at least 30 months before I watch a film again - and that's only a smaller percentage of all the films I watch, some films must never be watched again because there isn't enough time...

I have my classic films - many of which are others classics too - and I think the main thing about many of them is that if they're not of a specific era, they are timeless. They sit outside of the time they were made. In many ways, the reason I love Ridley Scott's Alien so much is because outside of the computers, this film could have been made at any point in the last 40 odd years. Plus, your mind excuses the silly monitors and computer 'graphics' because you know that it was made in 1979 and most  people's ideas of computers were still a world away. I've probably seen it half a dozen times and I still find it as tense as the first time. Which brings us nicely to the subject of today's blog. It has been at least 25 years since the wife and I sat down and watched Aliens, James Cameron's blockbuster follow-up in 1986. So we watched it when it was on ITV4 the other day and this is what I think.

I've mentioned in previous blogs (about Marvel films) that I really don't know what the fuss about Sam Raimi is. The Evil Dead was an anomaly in many ways, even if it's largely a farcical horror mash-up, because it cemented him as an outstanding and innovative film director, even if every film he made after it wasn't very good. There's a tone to Raimi's films that I've failed to like - that said I haven't seen all of them because I'm not a huge fan - and I have some misgivings about Dr Strange and the Multiverse of Madness purely based on the fact he's going to be directing it and you can bet your life he manages to squeeze Bruce Campbell in somewhere.

So what's this got to do with Aliens? Nothing apart from the similarity in my thoughts about James Cameron and Sam Raimi. To me, they both fit into the same category and while they're different film makers, they're both living off the success of groundbreaking films in their freshman years. I've actually seen all of Cameron's films, apart from Titanic (and his first - Piranha 2) and he reminds me of the argument used about Manchester City manager Pep Guardiola, that he is only successful because he manages the best teams and has the biggest budgets to spend on new player. Since Terminator, Cameron has demanded massive budgets to make a new feature film on average every 6 years and he's essentially Michael Bay with an Elon Musk-sized budget. 

His films are loud, brash, bombastic and full of misplaced confidence; even Terminator, but the difference with that film was it was ahead of the game. Nothing about it should have worked, from Arnold's inability to act to the actual premise, except it did and largely down to the prolonged finale; it reminded people of Alien in that you were never sure when it was going to end and the 'oh yeah, I forgot about that bit that only proves why it is a classic film' feeling you get when you watch it. There is a timeless quality about Terminator because it is set in a specific time and the plot is relevant today.

Which is why Cameron seemed the obvious choice to make Aliens. 

I remember loving Aliens; being heavily invested in it during the late 80s and 90s. It was a fitting sequel to a brilliant standalone film and that is a rare achievement. That's what I thought then, now however I view it with fresh eyes and many more years have passed since my last watch than had passed between then and when it was made.

The main problem with Aliens in 2022 is that unlike the first film, this has dated astronomically badly. Not just with things such as computers, but quite simply I can foresee no time in the future where the people of the world will want to return to 1980s fashion. It just wouldn't happen. It's all posing and posturing and soundbites and while it might have seemed forward thinking at the time of the release doesn't hold up to much now; even genuinely prescient things - such as exponential corporate greed - aren't handled in a 23rd century way. 

The story is also really rather far-fetched. Why would Ripley need to go back to the planet they found the first alien on? What would her purpose be, especially in a future where remote interplanetary conversation would be more sensible. I mean, if she had to go, why couldn't she have stayed on the mothership and talked via coms? Big ship - small crew doesn't seem to sit right now. Newt's survival was something of a stretch, given where the face huggers could get into and talk about dreadful actors, the kid who played her had the personality of a house brick. But the thing that sits the worst with me is the fact it is essentially the first film remade with disco lights and a remixed soundtrack. The massacres were handled in a way that suggested the film was being made for a PG-13 audience and all the tension, suspense and horror of the first film is lost in a constant barrage of noise and flashes.

It's really quite a dreadful mess of a film now with a pacing that's bizarre in its stop/start fashion and it's resolutions, which almost felt like afterthoughts to the main action. There's an awful lot to like about the film, but there's much more to wince at; if this is the future, did none of these people watch sci-fi films from the 20th century?

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Ordinarily, I'd stop there, but just recently I found a box of old DVDs a few weeks ago; tucked away in a cupboard and forgotten about was the 2006 Man of Steel film Superman Returns directed by Bryan Singer - he of two out of the first three X-Men films. This was direct 'follow-up' to the Christopher Reeve Superman films of the late 70s and 80s...

Obviously we'd seen this film because I kind of remembered watching it... except when we did watch it absolutely nothing at all seemed familiar. Surely I would have remembered that Superman Returns was a (kind of) direct sequel to Superman IV: Quest for Peace? But, no. Brandon Routh's poor Christopher Reeve impression did not ring any bells and while it was good, he didn't make a particularly impressive Man of Steel, even if Kevin Spacey's rather excellent rendition of Gene Hackman's Lex Luthor felt familiar. Kate Bosworth's Lois Lane made zero impression - I couldn't remember her or anything about her role. However grandiose and advanced the story seemed [wanted] to be, I think that maybe we had watched it and disliked it so much we erased it from our minds? Perhaps my late Mother-in-law - renowned for buying me presents I didn't want - bought it for me and I just hid it away? I don't really have an answer - not that one's needed. All I can safely say is whoever thought that making an homage/sequel to the four Reeve films of the 70s and 80s had a serious lapse of judgement. Maybe Singer sunk his film directing career after this as well.

The original Superman films were of a specific time and haven't aged at all well, so attempting to recreate the tone of those four films, in 2006, was utterly stupid. It has few, if any, redeeming qualities - mainly the special effects were now CGI and even that couldn't stop it from being a remarkably boring film. While 20 years had actually passed between IV and Returns it was only five in the film and for all of them Clark/Superman has been travelling the universe for anything Krypton related, but now he's back and ready to carry on where he left off. Luthor is still essentially a petty crook rather than the complicated and sophisticated villain he's been constantly reinvented as over the last 50 years in the comics and while Spacey is great, it's just a bit too pantomime and silly to be construed as a threat.

It led me to draw the conclusion that the 2000s were a very bad decade for comicbook adaptations, with very little that stands out, in my mind. 

Revisiting Old Marvel Films (Part 4)

Fun fact: John Favreau plays Foggy Nelson in Daredevil and Happy Hogan in the Iron Man and Spider-Man films. Ben Affleck - a very young looking one - was Daredevil and is one of the current incarnations of Batman. These guys have comics pedigree - much like a bunch of other actors who have all doubled up, so to speak. 

Not So Fun Opinion: Daredevil isn't a very good film. It could have been, but after some promising opening scenes it kind of lost its way and stopped being an interesting film and became a silly one.

That's pretty much what I took from this film. An extremely promising start with a clever modernisation of DD's origin, it all started so well. However, there's a huge leap from boy blinded by hazardous waste and a man in a red suit and this story opted not to dwell too long on the hows and didn't bother with the whys at all. One minute 12-year-old Matt is beating up bullies, the next he's a decent pro-bono lawyer and all-round legendary crime fighter. It was during that 30 seconds or so that the film went from a film with potential to one with a lot wrong with it.

The thing is, I can't really say what. The film is very much a meh kind of event and, I don't know if this was just an early superhero film thing, there's an awful lot that goes unexplained or the presumption is that you must understand the inner workings because you must be aware of the character's 40 odd year history. This was the case with the FF, Hulk and Spider-Man films and massively in the X-Men. I think that's why Iron Man worked so well when it first came out; there was zero reliability of the viewers knowledge; the story was told without any presumption. As a result, in this film, there's bugger all in the way of an introduction to Colin Farrell's Bullseye; he's just there, working for the Kingpin, despite no previous mention of him. You find out the whys in this case during the final battle scene between the dreadful Bullseye and DD, which is half decent of the director because he didn't bother for the rest of the film.

There's also this weird Kingpin subplot that taken out of context from the rest of the film makes you wonder how a big, massive, crime boss - who is about 7 feet tall, bald, black and Wilson Fisk who is also 7 feet tall, bald and black and is surrounded by lots of dodgy looking individuals is never mistaken for the Kingpin. Obviously this corner of the Marvel universe are drinking the same water as the staff at the Daily Planet. 

The story is basically a Frank Miller Daredevil story from the late 1970s merged with Joe Quesada's first story arc from his run on the rebooted comics from the late 1990s. Oddly enough, it also echoes the recent Hawkeye series, especially the themes of 'family business'. The Hawkeye series also introduced the Kingpin to the MCU, played by Vincent D'Onofrio, reprising his role from the Netflix Daredevil series, where he wasn't quite as strong but had considerably more leverage. In the end Farrell's Bullseye was far too comical and slightly stupid and stereotypical, Clarke's Fisk was just a big fat bloke and Garner's Elektra was actually just a plot device. Her demise and apparent resurrection echoed the comics, although I expect the Elecktra film will not be anything like Elektra: Assassin

It was nice to see so many characters named after famous Daredevil writers and artists; that's the kind of homage I like to see in superhero films, but that was about the only thing in the second hour of the film that was nice. The special effects were like someone watched Spider-Man and thought, 'we can get Daredevil to do that and he's blind!' Although it did look like extreme parkour at times. The other thing is apart from Matt Murdoch, who has enhanced olfactory powers, none of the other heroes or villains did, so when they go leaping into the unknown, jumping up stuff that a normal human wouldn't consider attempting and generally being 'super' then you struggle to take it seriously. 

The main problem with superhero films of this era was the reliance on the person watching understanding the character on screen is a superhero with a history. It's why I'm convinced Marvel's MCU might be biting off more than it can chew with the X-Men and mutants; ironically back then, the MCU were left with characters with the least baggage or to put it another way, a lesser amount of baggage that you have to reference. 

Affleck, even as a young man, struggled with the role. He wasn't bad, he just wasn't good. Daredevil is a ginger - no one casts him as a red head. 

Farrell was a dreadful Bullseye; there wasn't a huge amount of him in the film but he managed to ruin almost every moment.

Clarke really was a bit of a pussy as Kingpin.

Favreau should reprise his role as Foggy, preferably in a Tom Holland Spider-Man film.

Jennifer Garner struggles with acting. I never watched Alias but I do know it was very popular for a while and started JJ Abrams on the path to success.

Daredevil is a film you want to like but in the end - like this review - it just feels so badly pieced together it's no surprise it was produced by 20th Century Fox.

Now, I should existentially warn you, today's date is the 24th February 2022. I have obtained the next three non-MCU films and plan to watch them for this, probably, concluding chapter; but I can't tell you when or even if I'm going to feel the slightest bit inclined to watch them. That said, this might become an obsolete statement in less than a week...

However, it is now April 27 and it took me ages to pluck up the guts to watch...

Elektra - realising why the second Fantastic Four film bombed didn't take much working out, understanding why this direct sequel to Daredevil failed is a little less complicated... Elektra isn't a strong enough character to be a decent supporting character, so expecting her to carry an entire film is like expecting a gnat to give birth to an elephant... That said, nothing else really needs to be added. The character in the comic was written very much like every other mysterious female character of the time and even extensive jiggery-pokery by Frank Miller sort of failed to make Elektra anything more than just one of those 70s characters. 

The film is actually something of that old chestnut, the curate's egg. There is actually a half decent film in there desperately trying to scramble it's way out of a very jumbled mess. There's nothing original about the plot; Elektra is now an assassin who is given the job of offing a father and daughter by The Hand. Except she meets the aforementioned family independently and before finding out they were the targets. Racked by strangely uninformative flashbacks, Elektra decides to protect the family instead of killing them and therefore goes up against her former employers, of which she is not the only superpowered amongst them - although short of being slightly precognitive and quite good with toasting forks I'm not sure what Elektra actually brings to the table (or the fight).

The twist is that the girl she's protecting is actually another superpowered kid which The Hand wants dead if they can't have her and inevitably the two team up to win the day. Done by a better director, with a better script, better actors and without the superheroes and powers, this would be a cliched and hackneyed load of junk. Add them to the mix and you get a film that is neither any good or that desperately bad. I mean, I was glad when it finished and I was clockwatching from about the 75 minute mark, but I've seen much worse superhero films. 

Things that set it apart from just a crap film include the really annoying kid who frankly should die because she's so obnoxious. The clueless and frankly pointless father. The fact that Garner cannot act - she looks good striking poses in her red drapes, but she'd struggle in a clown's outfit and red wig in a MacDonald's advert. 

That brings me to the two Punisher films. 

Fun fact: Ray Stevenson who plays Frank Castle in War Zone also played Volstagg in the Thor films until his demise in Ragnarok.  Not so fun fact: I haven't actually watched the Netflix Punisher series; we sidestepped it at the time as it never appealed to us and frankly neither do these films. I have vague memories of Dolph Lundgren in the 90s(?) as Frank Castle and wish I didn't. I think I've harped on about this a lot but I'm not a huge fan of 'grounded' 'realistic' vigilante-type 'heroes'. Comics, for me, should be about the fantastic and the unimaginable, especially if they're going to creep into areas of film making that are years ahead of it in terms of experience. It's a surprise I didn't like Eternals considering the spectacle it was trying to achieve and of all the Kirby 70s creations, the Celestials were always the most mysterious and scary, but it failed on almost all fronts and it will be interesting to watch it again in about 18 months.

Anyhow... The Punisher. Let's be straight about one thing - Thomas Jane (or Tom Jane as he's credited) is most definitely NOT the Punisher. Nothing about the actor fits the profile or the comic book look of the character. That said, he doesn't do a very bad job of the role, it's simply just not convincing for me...

The film starts with a police sting that results in the son of a crime lord dying. Quite how 'Saint' the crime lord - played by John Travolta - manages to find out that Otto Krieg - the man who set the deal up - was actually undercover cop Frank Castle and then somehow blame him - out of many policemen - for the death of his son was something of a stretch, but I've seen films with flimsier plots. A word I can be accused of using a lot in these pre-MCU films is 'contrived' and while this one was more subtle than others, it was still a slightly dodgy foundation to base an entire revenge thriller on.

That aside, The Punisher isn't that bad. It's actually a lot better than other 'superhero' films of the same era. However, despite a pretty good cast - Jane, Travolta, Rebecca Stamos (another fun fact : she doubled up as Mystique in the X films), Samantha Mathis, Will Patton, Ben Foster (Warren Worthington III in the 3rd X-Men film) and Roy Scheider - it has almost laughable dialogue and the pacing was way off - it seemed to dwell on unimportant things and freeze through key plot points. It veered into knockabout comedy for about 20 minutes just over half way through the film in what I can only deduce was used to make Frank Castle less of a revenge driven killing machine and more human. There are also scenes that felt wrong - Castle basically killed people, but just occasionally he went OTT and did something more ... nasty. Perhaps this was done to emphasise the fact he's PUNISHING people - the crooks who killed his family; but it all seemed slightly out of character. 

This was the main problem with the film - it was all over the place. It was full of clever little twists that elevated it above your average crap Marvel film and then lost all of its credibility by counterbalancing these with stereotypical story stupidity. Some of the acting and dialogue were believable at times and unbelievable in others; the entire film reeked of inconsistency. I did get the feeling they were trying to make this film with something of a heart; to give it something more than just jumping from one violent set piece to another and to a degree it succeeds, but largely it's a film that feels dated and slightly irrelevant. It felt like a revenge thriller that didn't need the words The Punisher anywhere near it.

[An aside: Punisher: Dirty Laundry is a bizarre and weird thing. Made in 2012 and seemingly with no obvious input from Marvel, it's a 10 minute, possible fan-made, 're-boot' of Thomas Jane's Frank Castle, in a very violent, outrageously nasty and probably more realistic to the comics than anything that preceded this. But is it a Punisher film or is it a bit of fan fun for 10 minutes with an ending that suggests the character you've been watching is one and the same? Was it a surreptitious toe-in-the-water by Marvel to see if there was wiggle room for an ultra violent Punisher reboot or had Jane's career slumped so badly by this point he was prepared to pimp himself out for a high quality fan film? I'm going for the latter because much of the production value of this short is cheap and cheerful. It has been called the best Punisher film ever, but the problem with the Punisher is there have been umpteen male, female and animal vigilantes with more interesting back stories and better actors made and released, maybe this is a character that needs leaving alone now?]

Punisher War Zone has one extra fact that is both a bit nerdy and quite telling - it's literally the only full length Marvel film that hasn't got Kevin Feige's name attached to it - and I've double checked! It is also the only Marvel Knights film I know of. Ghost Rider: Spirit of Vengeance is allegedly a Marvel Knights film but not according to anything I've seen.

As far as this film is concerned, I'm not really sure why it was even made. There appears to be no logic in rebooting the 'franchise' with a new actor and a slightly altered origin; however, that said, there appears to be no logic in why this absolute heap of shite was made in the first place. It appears I saved the worst till last; this is a film that in many ways is far far worse than the woeful Man-Thing film mainly because there are people you've heard of in this film; although to be fair not many of them would sneak on to a C level celebrity list.

For starters, the British actor Ray Stevenson - best known for being Mrs Stevenson's little boy and Volstagg in the Thor films (as previously mentioned) - doesn't utter a single word until the 29th minute of the film and even then his American accent is... questionable (I'm being charitable). While he might look big and beefy in Thor - as an Asgardian - he looks weedy and unimposing in P:WZ and while you could write a list of everything that was wrong about his Frank Castle, it would be nowhere as long as any of the rest of the film and why it was so bad...

Dominic West as Jigsaw, his strange brother - Looney Bin Jim - and the assortment of Dick Tracy-lite pantomime villain gangsters littered throughout the film, absolutely stunk the place out. The cops were all cliched doughnut guzzling idiots; there seemed to be a clear belief that the potential viewer must be a fan of the comics because we were introduced to the Punisher's network/team of helpers without any real explanation of who they were or why they were so important - incidentally a different team of helpers than the ones who helped Thomas Jane. The film was made mainly in Montreal with British and French Canadian actors; some of the scenes were filmed in Glasgow and a few others elsewhere in the UK. They used a lot of stock footage of New York including one cityscape of LA and whenever you were in a situation where a close-up was not needed the camera work went all fuzzy and blurry with polarised colours - almost as if they didn't want you spotting things that weren't in New York (like double decker buses). They even ran a sunrise backwards to donate a sunset rather than simply filing a sunset. The general theme to take from this is if could cut corners it did. 

Let's put this into some kind of context: I can't remember exactly what I think was the worst Marvel superhero film ever made (despite disliking many) but Punisher: War Zone is a new entry with a bullet at #1. It is a really dreadful, amateur-dramatic lump of wood and should be avoided like the plague and I'm absolutely gobsmacked this has a 5.9 rating on IMDB. I think this is a lie. Have I mentioned the word 'pantomime' or things like melodrama, amateur dramatic or the script that felt like it had been written by a 10 year old with a potato gun. The violence was OTT, with heads and arms disappearing or breaking like they were made from porcelain. It really decided to go the camp video nasty route. It should not be watched and no more Punisher films should ever be considered again.

And that pretty much concludes this foray into the Marvel films that sit outside of the current Marvel/Disney MCU. Yes, I've missed out Howard the Duck, The (original) Punisher (with Dolph Lundgren), Roger Corman's Fantastic Four (which never really got released because it was horrid), Ghost Rider and Ghost Rider: Spirit of Vengeance, The Blade Trilogy, the rest of the X-Men franchise or any of the very obscure/rare films such as Nick Fury or Gen X. Some I've seen before, others I have more desire to self-mutilate than waste time on badly made curiosities.

I think it's safe to assume that non-MCU Marvel films are generally a load of crap and virtually every single one of them have flaws that spoil it. It's clear that until at least 2007, the approach was to throw as much shit at the wall and see if any of it stuck (and none of it did). Obviously, the irony now is that I find the MCU tiresome and I can be just as critical of it now as I have been of some of these.

Now, go and do something interesting or useful. 

Revisiting the MCU (Part One - Phase One)

I realised while watching Iron Man what my problem with the Marvel Cinematic Universe is now. It was confirmed when I watched Thor and Avengers Assemble - at this stage - I'm watching the films in a totally random way (I'm still to decide to re-watch Iron Man 2 and Incredible Hulk) - the original Phase One films were by and large absolutely fucking brilliant. They oozed with great lines, fantastic special effects, nice compact stories and a theme that ran through them all like an analogy that suits this description. It's what's missing from 2022 MCU films; that sense of wonder; that feeling you're walking into something bigger and better than any other film franchise has tried to do; the sense of myth building happening in front of your eyes.

With the exception of Mark Ruffalo's version of the Hulk, we'd met Tony Stark, Thor, Clint Barton, Natasha Romanov and Steve Rogers before, either as cameos, guest-stars or in their own films and seeing them combine in a New York-levelling blockbuster like Marvel's The Avengers (or whatever it's called in whatever country it's shown) felt like the first time you read a comics-spanning crossover, or saw an Avengers comic with a galactic threat. No wonder Avengers: Infinity War and Avengers: Endgame were record-breaking box office hits; the MCU had created a fabulous new world/universe and it was time to tear it apart...

You could argue that the current Multiverse story unfolding in the MCU is bigger, bolder and more daring, but it isn't just that, there's whatever new sub-plot Shang-Chi belongs to, which also might include some of the scenarios from the Falcon and the Winter Soldier and Hawkeye series, the new cosmic storyline involving the Eternals, other family members of Thanos's and the Celestials and other things waiting in the wings to further muddy the waters (Blade, Black Knight, etc). You could argue that after the Infinity Saga the only way forward for the MCU is to have a multi-plot even-bigger blockbusters styled series of movies that while linked to each other and the MCU are also new even-bigger threads of their own. Like I said, muddy the waters, because how the second Black Panther film, the Ms Marvel and Moon Knight series, the next Ant-Man and the Wasp film and The Marvels fit into the grand scheme of things will obviously become clearer, but all the while it just feels like an attempt to get as many people buying tickets to watch all their films as possible - and, yes, I know that's how the business of film franchises work, but it didn't seem to be a problem when the MCU was in its embryonic stages. I think that was because people wanted to see what happens next - like the first or second season of a great TV programme; the problems arise when you have to top the previous season with something even more outrageous and MASSIVE. 

I've forecasted a couple of times now that I believe the Fantastic Four film - probably due to drop autumn/winter 2023 - will be the conclusion of the Multiverse story and may also reset/reboot the entire MCU franchise by recasting characters such as Captain America, Iron Man, Black Widow and as many of the other 'Avengers' characters who have aged up to 15 years by the time we get to the FF film and will be hard pressed to continue as these super heroics without serious money on special effects or having them all get geriatric together (plus if Johannsson, Evans and RDjr aren't going to reprise their roles in a new reunified single universe, then you're going to need new actors to inherit the roles).

But this is all speculation and what I'm here to do, this time, is wax lyrically about why Phase One was the best of all the stages of the MCU so far...

Iron Man is an exceptional way to start a film franchise. Just about everything about it is perfect and largely believable - yes men in iron suits firing disrupters might sound far-fetched but even in the 1960s when Tony Stark was first wounded - in Viet Nam - and needed the armour to stop shrapnel from entering his heart and killing him, this was a concept that over the years stopped being science fiction and is now not far from being science fact. Marvel's choice of doing Iron Man first is at the very heart of why they've been so successful and frankly the only thing that has dimmed the MCU has been the fact that there haven't been more Iron Man films, specifically better ones than 2 & 3.

Robert Downey Jr was born to play Tony Stark and for 10 years he ruled the MCU as the stand out character, the soul of it and the backbone of it. Captain America, also brilliantly portrayed in the films, is a close second, but he didn't have Tony Stark's joie de vivre or one-liners or looks or suave and brilliant sophistication. Tony was the billionaire we want all our real billionaires to be like and he cemented his place in everything with the closing scene of the first film where, after a couple of poor attempts at suggesting the Iron Man was a bodyguard, he just comes out and admits that it's him and BANG! The MCU was not only born, it was there, in your face, in a way the comics could never equal.

I bloody love this film. It's by far and away my favourite MCU film. It had just enough of everything without being OTT and felt so understated it allowed everything else to ramp up the peril and action without it ever feeling like they were simply ramping up the action because that is what was expected.

Thor has slowly crept up the list of great MCU films. I think there was a sense of because it's a Kenneth Branagh film it was going to be a bit too serious, hi-brow almost. It's not, but it does add some marvellous sense of cosmic and fantastic to the franchise. It's a big and bold film with lots of Shakespearean touches and a true sense that Asgard is a bonkers place with such grandeur and wonder that it's almost impossible for us mere mortals to comprehend it. Branagh does a bang on job and our introduction to Thor is, like Iron Man, a real nod to the original comics. It is however a proper foray into fantasy territory and at times feels a little rushed, almost like Branagh wanted to focus on the characters rather than the action. I was initially disappointed that The Destroyer was made too easy to get rid of - in the comics it was a character that was almost impossible to defeat, which was why it usually served Odin and wasn't used against our hero, unless Odin wasn't about and that was how it played in the film.

It also properly introduces us to SHIELD, although it was obviously a key component in the Iron Man film, this gave them more of an identity, albeit slightly more sinister than they would become. It's a really big film with some excellent stars camping it up and obviously having a great time. The real stand-out is Tom Hiddleston's Loki, who has truly metamorphosed from the nasty villain he became for the Avengers film into a truly heroic character. This film ranks very high in my list of favourite MCU films - top 5 at least and the crazy thing is I doubted whether they could pull Thor off and make him and his supporting cast into mainstays of the MCU, yet the three Thor films to date, in terms of quality and story, have all been excellent.

Marvel's The Avengers (or Avengers Assemble) almost feels like it arrived too early and yet as a spectacle it's a real powerhouse of a film and while Joss Whedon's stock might have fallen he was really able to flesh out some of the characters and yet feels like a proper rollercoaster of ride.

There are things about this film that feel a little off. We last saw Loki plunging into the abyss of space and time in the final moments of Thor and we're reintroduced to him as a sunken eyed, revenge-addled nasty with a disdain toward humans that felt misplaced in many ways, probably due to the fact that while he is a villain, his relationship with his brother has always been handled with love and tenderness, despite the God of Mischief always looking for an angle to exploit. The thing is, this film was designed to essentially introduce us to the threat of Thanos, without him really being in it apart from a brief mention and the first post-credit scene. This was the film that opened the world to threats from far away and there's an uneasy feeling about what SHIELD has been doing in the months after Thor and Captain America: The First Avenger.

It's also great to see the Hulk and the beginnings of the relationship that would never really happen between Banner/Hulk and the Black Widow. Ruffalo ended up being more than an adequate replacement for Edward Norton, who played the character in the appropriated Incredible Hulk. I also felt that the focus on Hawkeye, the Widow and Nick Fury was balanced extremely well; after all the other Avengers had their own films and while the Hulk was undoubtedly a slightly different one from the 2008 film, that was far enough in the past for Marvel to take the key parts from that and replace Norton with someone who was likely to be in for duration.

This film was the end of Phase One, because everything after this was either closely or subliminally linked to the thing that is often referred to as The Infinity Saga but it had everything you needed from a blockbuster stand alone film and while we're unlikely to see another Avengers film of this ilk again, it's a formula that worked extremely well and shouldn't be forgotten about, especially given how muddled the MCU seems to have become.

Captain America: The First Avenger - which I watched about four months ago - is a cracking film that completely destroyed my hate for the character. I've spent most of my life in comics struggling in vain to find a run of the Captain America comic that I've enjoyed, mainly because I've never really got the idea of Captain America (yet, perversely I've never had a problem with Captain Britain).

I approached this film a decade ago thinking I'd dislike it and was proven wrong and now I've seen it three times I can safely say it's one of the three best Marvel films ever. It's a great war film that feels like a costumed version of an Indiana Jones film. It has sexy characters, a great script, a relevant origin story and, like all the others, seemed to stick with the origin story to a tee. There's little wrong with it, even the pantomime Nazis and Red Skull are a perfect fit. It sets so much up that I feel was needlessly ignored in later MCU films and has the Howling Commandos, who were rather let down by there not being a Sgt Fury to lead them - now that would have been something, especially if Nick Fury had been nearly 100 years old when he became director of SHIELD.

It's almost a perfect superhero film, let down by the tiniest of quibbles.

While I have The Incredible Hulk to watch again - it was only about a year ago since we last watched it - along with Iron Man 2, I firmly believe that Phase One of the MCU is the best of everything that was to follow.

Pop Culture blah blah blah (part many of lots)

In these end of times - famine, pestilence and war - the only thing we have is the television to remind us of our mortality, or the things we no longer have or the situations we're glad we've never faced... yet.

So I'm going to kick off with something I ended with last time...

Raised by Wolves has to be the oddest thing on TV. I said it really needed to up its game and it seems the people who made the show have done just that. It's utterly bonkers, makes no sense and suggests that mankind were settlers on Earth from this other planet. It's choc-a-block full of bizarre characters, weird monsters and acid seas. The acting is stilted, almost like the cast were deliberately told to copy the last am dram show they saw and the story seems to be like a stream of consciousness, going in whatever direction it feels like. There are undersea creatures that steal babies and live in seas of boiling acid and there are ancient androids that can regrow themselves, oh and you have Mother, Father and they're brood of protectorates. Mother is a Necromancer - an android capable of destroying cities, while Father is a docile, slightly naïve character who seems to have lost his direction. Then there's Marcus, who was superhuman but isn't anymore (or is he?); he was an atheist infiltrator but now is a converted Mithraic; his wife Sue who was a doctor, who briefly became a fruit-giving tree but her fate is undecided as she was recently eaten by the floaty snake dragon thing... There are killer child androids with no faces and Campion - who is probably the main protagonist - born on the planet, he's utterly annoying, ridiculously trusting and the kid that plays him can't act for toffee... As this shorter season concludes, Mother has been imprisoned by Grandmother, the new video game is slowly brainwashing the atheists who are now viewing Mother as their messiah, Marcus is dead but might not be and they're all slowly transforming into the acid sea aliens. I am not making this shit up.

***

The highlight of the year so far has been Yellowjackets. This is a story told mainly in two time zones - 1996 and 2021. In 1996, a team of schoolgirl footballers are heading to the National Finals in a privately owned jet when it crashes in the Canadian wilderness, leaving about 20 survivors. In 2021, we follow the lives of four of those survivors 25 years on, in the knowledge that whatever happened in Canada stayed in Canada, except everyone else wants to know what happened in Canada?

Unlike Raised by Wolves, which I could literally talk about continuously as there is so much going on it and probably wouldn't spoil it for anybody, Yellowjackets is a different beast entirely and talking about it is simply saturated in potential spoilers. The four women, now in their 40s, are all psychopaths in their own way, with exceptional performances from Melanie Lynskey and Christina Ricci - and their 17 year old counterparts; but it's what actually happened in Canada that is the main focus. Obviously the adventures of the four psycho survivors is compelling and unexpected, but these people had to have had something devastating - other than surviving a plane crash - happen to them in the wilderness and we've yet to find out what it is yet.

There is, I'm worried to say, an element of Lost in it, because there is something decidedly strange about the place they crashed and the strange log cabin they find to live in, but don't let that put you off because the ten episodes were all excellent. The only thing that worries me is the cliff hanger ending suggests that there's something even odder going on and maybe the four ladies focused on in this first season are the least mad of all those who returned...

You should watch it; it's absolutely fantastic.

***

In the last one of these I talked about how Resident Alien felt like it really jumped the shark. A few weeks further on and while it still is a far inferior season to the first, it is, at last, starting to pull together into something that resembles the pace and excellence of the first series. The thing that really sets it apart from most alien TV shows is the fact that Harry's species are actually quite bloodthirsty and savage - just like the humans they want to eradicate. There is a feeling that all the preamble and seemingly wasted episodes in the first half of the season might just have some bearing on the rest of the series. This was kind of confirmed in episode 8 of season two, when all the stuff you were frowning about, thinking they were just padding out and treading water, somehow came home to roost. I'm still not sure how it relates to the ongoing story, but at least we now have an idea why we all wasted hours wondering when something was going to happen.

***

We started to watch the sixth and final season of The Expanse. We watched the first episode about a month ago and neither of us have felt compelled to return to it. It feels a little like Babylon 5 when it wrapped up the cosmic story early in season 4 only for the remainder of episodes to never really feel like they were any good (on the whole, they weren't). The Expanse has focused heavily on the Belter story and season 6 is essentially all about that struggle. If there is some conclusion to the ancient alien proto-molecule story then I've not heard about it. Most of the people I know who loved the series have condemned the sixth season as dull, uninteresting and overlong - at just six 50 minute episodes... I may never finish it. That doesn't seem to bother me much.

***

Picard is head and shoulders the best Star Trek series to come out since probably The Next Generation. While Disco Very has, at least, finally woken up and done something, Picard simply takes ideas and themes from the past and plays with them in an entertaining and enjoyable way. The problem really is Patrick Stewart, who, as much as love him to bits, is about 120 years old and is becoming frail and it's difficult to imagine him in these situations. This series should have been made 20 years ago when Patrick could still pull it off; the thing is it wouldn't have been and it's only the advent of streaming and saturation of product that has got us to this point. It's still an interesting series that appears to be taking a leaf out of old NG episodes and the still wonderful Star Trek: The Voyage Home.

As for Female Black Jesus Saves the Universe Again, the season concluded with what really felt like the concluding part of the series. It felt like an ending; like the show wasn't going to be renewed so they were tying up loose ends and setting sail into the nearest star. Even Tilly was back for one last display of chunkiness. So imagine my horror to discover that Discovery has been renewed for a fifth season... Except, not in this house. That's it for this Star Trek series and we'll probably give Strange New Worlds a miss as well. The retconning of Spock's family and history has rather spoiled it for me, this and countless other things. Time to say goodbye.

***

We've finally started watching Ozark. I've had a number of people recommend this series to me and the reviews I've seen all suggest it's a series we needed to watch, so last week we started... It isn't exactly what I expected, but that's a facile comment because I didn't really know what to expect. I knew it was about an 'accountant' who laundered drug money for a cartel and that it was set in the Ozarks, but after that it was a blank slate.

As I said the other day, it's good but it's certainly not up there with great series such as Breaking Bad and The Sopranos. It's full of characters who are really dislikeable and with the exception of Jason Bateman's Marty Byrd (the main character), I really couldn't give a shit about the fate of anybody. But, here's the thing, even Bateman's character isn't particularly nice; he's a very clever and successful man who just happens to be quite, decent and honest man involved in the worst possible things who allows that culture to become his own life. His wife is an entitled bitch; his daughter even more so and his son is borderline psychopath. The supporting players are all rednecks and hillbillies without a shred of decency among them and what is compelling about it is just how far it will go to compete with great crime shows of the past. I'm sticking with it, but I'd like to see it really go off the rails over the next three seasons.

***

My cursory The Walking Dead mention is not a criticism, for once. The final season, split into three eight-part sections is almost two-thirds of the way through and we're deep into The Commonwealth territory. There is at least a feeling of dread about the series once again, except this time it isn't the dead that bring it but the fact the Commonwealth could well be very bad guys indeed. What with the Civic Republic looming large in Fear and the lame World Beyond spin-off, one gets the impression that eventually we're heading for a showdown between all of our hero factions and these two giants of the living world that's left. For anyone that cares, I'm betting 50p the Civic Republic - not their military wing - will end up being the good guys.

***

Moving onto films, briefly. I know Ryan Reynolds is an acquired taste; you either love him or hate him and there doesn't seem to be much middle ground with him. Some of his films are great, others are meh, but after the utter disappointment I felt watching Spider-Man; No Way Home, watching  Reynolds in The Adam Project (along with Mark Ruffalo and Zoe Saldana) was a breath of fresh air. I thoroughly enjoy a good time travel caper and this certainly ticked all the boxes. It was also over an hour shorter than the Spider-Man film, which suggests to me that Marvel's films can't just be 90 or 100 minute self-contained treats - like Iron Man - and have to be bloated and full of navel-gazing and unnecessary bullshit.

Oddly enough that last sentence seems to be how I'm feeling about the forthcoming Moon Knight series, debuting on Disney+ in about ten days. I know a lot of people who bang on about not writing the character off or thinking he's just an all-white Batman and many of them site the Bill Sienkiewicz drawn issues of his comic in the late 1980s and 1990s, but I simply never got the character. For me he was just Marvel's Batman copy with some mystic Egyptian shit thrown in to obfuscate the obvious rip-off.

This forthcoming series honestly fills me with no real feelings at all - it will exist, like Corrie or Peaky Blinders (both of which I've never watched). Apart from never really liking the character, I'm not a huge fan of Oscar Isaac; I can take or leave (mainly leave) Ethan Hawke and having seen a number of trailers for it, I just wish I probably didn't have to watch it...

Just to make matters worse, the first trailers for Ms Marvel fell in the last week or so and it appears that this will be a series designed for the 8-11 years bracket and while it probably won't be it kind of pisses me off so much more than Marvel's incoming Batman rip-off.

Ms Marvel will feature heavily in the next Captain Marvel film, now called Marvels presumably because Brie Larson's Captain Marvel wasn't the multi-billion dollar smash that some other Marvel films have been and they could be seen pandering to the fan element that hated her being cast in the first place. Now unless Marvels is going to be a teen superhero film, I can't see the point of targeting the trailers for Ms Marvel to pre-teens. I mean, it's not likely to have old farts like me falling over themselves to watch it, nor do I think that anyone who hasn't got kids or falls outside of the demographic they appear to be aiming at. In fact I'm struggling to understand why Marvel and the MCU is going in the direction it is. It's not just the Multiverse, it seems, but also more emphasis on the cosmic and the mystic. Everything is as clear as mud at the moment, something you could never accuse Phases one thru four of ever being.

I have been accused of being a curmudgeonly old git who refuses to accept the direction the MCU is going. I've almost had arguments with people because I really disliked Eternals, didn't like Shang Chi, think the MCU/Sony Spider-Man films are no better than the shit Sony-on-their-own-ones and I couldn't understand why the hell they didn't make Black Widow as the film to follow Infinity War rather than the Ant-Man and Wasp film - which wasn't bad, but, you know...

Waiting in the wings are the bigger guns; like they've been wheeled out because the new direction isn't making the kind of money they hoped. The Doctor Strange film had better be good because employing Sam Raimi to do any film sounds as though it's based on nostalgia and belief rather than using any common sense - he's a dreadful director with a catalogue of crap films with only The Quick and the Dead having any redeeming features and that was a heavily-stylised 'western'. 

This will be followed by Thor: Love and Thunder with Natalie Portman becoming the God of Thunder and likely to feature The Guardians of the Galaxy and another villain from the Simonsen era of Thor (which, however brilliant, had almost as many corny, duff stories as it had gems). 

Is it me or are Marvel wheeling out the remaining 'Avengers' because the other films have simply been shite? Maybe they need to remind people that the characters - who are left - that drew them in originally are still out there doing stuff?

I am also aware that my growing dislike of Marvel films is probably sounding like a stuck record and not going to get a lot of people agreeing with me, but I write blogs like this, I'm not about to ignore Marvel; it's like talking about football generally in 2022 and omitting both Liverpool and Man City from your discussions.

***

And that's about it for this time. We have a number of shows to catch-up on and some new ones that sound intriguing. From appears to be another weird series with inescapable scenarios and, um, monsters, while there's obviously going to be a slew of other new things that'll land in the next couple of months. There's my promised final round up of the non-MCU Marvel films that we have to watch - Elektra, the two 21st century Punisher films, which I expect will be as bad as they're rated on IMDB and a bunch of other films that we have but can't find the enthusiasm to watch. By the time I pluck up the guts to watch them Dr Strange and the Multiverse of Madness will have its cinematic release and as I said earlier this is a film that might just drive the final nail in the coffin of my MCU infatuation. I'm also finding the DC films to be hit or miss affairs, but on a basic level some of them have been more enjoyable than I expected. That doesn't mean I'll be rushing out to see a Batman or another Aquaman film, but Black Adam, The Flash and another Shazam film will be welcome changes, I hope.

I'm getting recommendations from people, which I kind of want to try, but I also kind of don't, because people have differing tastes to me and I'm often let down because I expect more and they don't fulfil the initial promise. I still feel reluctant to get involved with many UK-based dramas, mainly because the number of people who recommend them is balanced by people who don't rate them and I know I should gauge them for myself, but you simply can't escape other opinions and they influence me more than I should allow...

A Late Review: Spider-Man: No Way Home

Having just watched all of the old Spider-Man films not too long after watching the first two Sony/MCU reboots with Tom Holland, I went into this with high hopes, great expectations and a bunch of other cliched phrases about optimism. I should have been wary... You know, you're looking forward to something and it's awful, as opposed to going in expecting the worst and being pleasantly surprised.

I don't think I've truly enjoyed a Marvel film since Avengers: Infinity War. The second Spider-Man film left me a little cold, Ant-Man and the Wasp ditto and this year's films - Black Widow, Shang-Chi and Eternals - all left me feeling like maybe it was time I stopped investing what time I have left on this planet with Marvel films. But Marvel is like a potent and addictive drug; the comics had the same affect on me for a lot longer than they should have and while I haven't been a comic book fan for 20 years now (that long?!?) the MCU has allowed me to return to the awe and wonder I felt in the 20th century.

The wife and I watched Iron Man and then Thor last week and while it was the third time of asking for both films I pretty much enjoyed them as much as the first and second times. They are cracking films with a real sense of something new and different, yet by the time I got to Avengers: Endgame (with its flaws, plot holes and overwrought battles) I was suffering from Marvel fatigue.

So, as I said, I went into this with a lot of optimism, especially as I'd heard so many positives about it and it has an IMDB rating of almost 9 and was the first post-COVID film to exceed $1billion at the box office. You know there's a 'but' coming, the thing is it's not quite as simple as that...

No Way Home starts like an express train; in fact it's one of the strangest starts to any Marvel film I've seen. It literally kicks off where the last one finished and for the first 40 minutes it flies past in a flurry of magic, teen angst, media frenzy and the kind of reaction you would expect if Spider-Man was real and his identity had just been given away. Then the wife paused it to go and sort something out and while it wasn't her fault, from that point onwards it seemed to go wrong with only fleeting scenes where I felt I was watching a good film...

Presumably Thomas Haden Church wasn't deemed good enough to be in the film as the humanised Sandman, with him depicted as a sand man rather than the one who appeared in Spider-Man 3. He makes a fleeting appearance towards the end, as does Rhys Ifans as the Lizard, but both are depicted as their counterparts throughout the film in what felt like a dehumanisation of two characters depicted as victims in their respective first appearances. Alfred Molina was great and without giving too much away he became the man he was when he saved Spider-Man and the city in Spider-Man 2; he really was the best thing in this film. Jamie Foxx as Electro wasn't the nerdy scientist he was in the Amazing Spider-Man, instead he seemed bigger, stronger, more confident and actually a little bit nasty and corrupted by the power he had and the Green Goblin, ably played again by Willem Dafoe, ditched the Mighty Morphin Power Rangers look-a-like villain and actually became a truly evil piece of shit; arguably far worse than the megalomaniac depicted in the first Spider-Man film. I felt a little let down by this Sinister Five (should have been Six) because it all felt a little too contrived.

I never knew MJ was Michele Jones-Watson. That realisation felt like a real blow to the stomach, but, you see, in my day Ned Leeds wasn't a American Chinese kid, he was a reporter for the Bugle and had his best stories in Daredevil. Betty Brant as a TV reporter with blonde hair? Oh and Flash Thompson was a moron, not a cretin...

The inclusion of Doctor Strange should have made this an inspirational film; Cumberbatch isn't bad as Stephen Strange yet he was almost reduced to a comedy foil in this, especially as scenes shown in trailers were not in this film - a red herring often used by Marvel in their previews; they've done it before but never so obviously than in this one. In fact all the film seemed a bit rushed considering its almost 2½ hour run time.

The reintroduction of Maguire and Garfield in their Spidey personas was good, but that's where the continuity errors start to show themselves. Maguire is now in his 40s and looked it; Garfield was far more emo in this than he was in his two outings and ultimately their involvement in the film ended up feeling like they were forced into a film they almost didn't belong in. It's also a remarkably sad film with deaths and (mini) endings that all felt part of the plot rather than the story. Don't get me wrong, it was good to see them, but it also didn't feel right. A device to shoehorn the multiverse fully into our newer understanding of this post Endgame MCU. 

I'm actually quite torn about this film; it's fresh in my mind and yet I almost feel like I need to watch it again to perhaps fully understand what happened, the thing is I don't know if I could watch it again, at least not for a couple of years, because it felt over long, drawn out and that's after the opening 40 minutes which in itself felt like it was becoming the best of this new Spider-Man franchise.

For those that care and don't know, Parker returns to New York with the news that Mysterio has revealed his identity to the world's press and after interrogations by the FBI, an appearance from Charlie Cox as Matt 'Daredevil' Murdock and being moved to Happy Hogan's super-apartment replete with Stark technology, Peter decides to ask Dr Strange to make the world forget he's Spider-Man so that his life can return to some normality; the problem is everyone needs to forget he's Spidey, but Peter wants MJ and Ned and May and Happy to know his identity because he doesn't want to go through the problems he had the first time they discovered he was a superhero. Naturally this spell ends up going badly wrong; everyone still knows he's Spider-Man and as a result Strange has ripped a hole in the fabric of the multiverse allowing anyone who knew Parker was the webslinger into the MCU all with a consuming passion to kill him. So far so okay. It's from this point it stops making sense.

Peter wants to cure these people of their powers so when they return to their respective universes they won't die as a result of fighting alternate versions of himself - this in itself makes little or no sense, presumably because these villains have been plucked from their universes before their deaths, which like Endgame would mean that divergences in the time continuum were being created. I come to this conclusion because of an exchange between Doc Ock and Tobey Maguire when Otto remarks that Peter is all grown up. It does all the right things for seemingly all the wrong reasons and begs the question if these dead villains can come back to life in the MCU how come MJ and Gwen don't appear as well (naturally because Dunst and Stone are serious actors now who probably didn't want to be or weren't needed in this film)?

The film feels slightly disconnected from the point all these old characters and the other Parkers appear; the narrative feels sewn together rather than a flowing story and in conclusion I have to say that it's essentially a poor film stitched together with emotion-wrenching scenes almost designed to deflect from all the film's faults. I don't think I liked it very much, but then again (like Batman) I can take or leave Spider-Man, so that isn't much of a surprise.

Oh and what was the point of Venom? Relegated to the mid credit scene, while leaving a little present that has me slightly puzzled considering the character is 'owned' by Sony. Oh and the end credits scene was the biggest cop out of the lot - a rehashed version of the Dr Strange and the Multiverse of Madness preview...

This leaves me feeling nothing but dread about May's second Doctor Strange film, mainly because it's directed by Sam Raimi, who, apart from two Evil Dead films, isn't actually that good at making films (and they weren't that good). I think Marvel's shot its bolt and now struggles to produce anything anywhere near as good as their first few years. The best thing they've done in the last four  years was the Hawkeye TV series and even that copped out at the end. If you haven't seen this film then it's probably because you're not a Marvel fan; therefore if you want to see it I'd wait a couple of years before it appears on TV, because if you're competent enough to see the massive plot holes, hammy acting and poor writing in this film you really won't enjoy it.