Obligatory disclaimer: real life sucks. It sucks on a
personal level, and you cannot escape it; you turn on the news and you see that
the U.S. has brought the suckage onto an international level just ask the
Kurds. Maybe this was a clever maneuver by the Donald, to tie up Turkey and
Iran in struggle over Syrian control while he deals with his own problems back
home, but it still kind of petty and unpleasant, especially in the Middle East.
There are even rumors of ISIS coming back. Sigh. It is precisely this sort of
mainstream media propaganda that causes outliers to presume that ISIS had been
a creation of the U.S. all along, just as the Taliban had been back in the Cold
War. As we remember, the Taliban eventually bit the U.S. in the ass so badly,
that it might not have fully recovered even by now, and as for ISIS, it is
anyone’s guess. The Kurds are not impressed with the Donald or the rest of the
land of bold and free, it would look like. What is next?
Well, I would like to escape into TV land, but everything
out there is either a rerun of a now-ended show, a Halloween cooking special,
or something new that is so forgettable… or is memorable, for entirely wrong
reasons. There’s ‘Stumptown’, whose best trait is the main character, who is
played by Cobie Smulders, aka Maria Hill from the MCU. Alternatively, maybe she
is actually Soren, a Skrull – an alien from the MCU. Either way, back in MCU,
CS is not the biggest fish, so maybe ‘Stumptown’ is an attempt to recast
herself as someone new – a main character in a TV series… that is based on a comic
book series. Here the biggest difference from MCU (or any of the DC TV shows)
is that ‘Stumptown’ is not all that well known, so it is anyone’s guess if CS’s
strategy will succeed or fail.
There’s ‘Almost Family’, made by Fox. It is a nice,
family-friend TV show about an atypical TV family… that may glorify rape. The
main characters are all doctors of a medical doctor who ran an artificial
fertilization clinic and used his sperm in place of others’. Even to a
non-American this sounds rather yucky, and the American society itself is
having hysterics and in a bad way. I do not like SJWs, but I am not an
American; the people behind ‘Almost Family’ are, and they should have expected
at least some sort of an unpredictable reaction behind their unconventional TV
series. Instead, they seem to be almost ignorant of what they have done. Ouch.
There is also ‘Primal’ by Mr. Gennady Tartakovsky, which is,
so far, about friendship between a caveman and a T-Rex. It’s not a bad premise,
but between the duo co-existing with woolly mammoths, for example, and one of
the show’s villains, a chimeric dinosaur that shows traits of a T-Rex, a
Giganotosaurus and a Ceratosaurus at the same time on the other, I think I’ll
wait for the next ‘Jurassic World’ movie (or maybe the ‘Kong vs. Godzilla 2020’)
instead for this sort of quasi-prehistoric chimeras… oh wait. The next ‘Jurassic
World’ movie will have no chimeras’ a-la Indominus Rex and Indoraptor. Score
one for team JW!
In the movies, meanwhile, we have ‘Joker-2019’. I admit – I
am not going to talk about it, the feelings are too raw. Essentially, this
version of the clown prince of crime is a stereotypical loser, who lives with
his mother, and then one day he gets a gun, and suddenly his violent dreams get
a very realistic outlet. Arthur Fleck is that pathetic and insignificant, but
then he gets a loaded gun, and suddenly he is brave enough, (or at least
hysterical enough) to kill. And no one can resist him, because no one expects
him to have a gun – he is that pathetic. There is enough of breadcrumbs in ‘Joker
2019’ for GCPD to make a conclusion and arrest Arthur Fleck before things get
too out of hand, but they never do, and instead it is the Waynes who are
killed. Why? What is the phenomenon that led Arthur Fleck/Joker-2019 to the top
of the social order in Gotham-2019?
There are two baseline suggestions. One is that Gotham’s
poor, its’ proletariat, its’ plebeians, are sheep and less socially derived
than their counterparts in Shakespeare’s play ‘Coriolanus’ that deals with the
history of the Roman republic quite some time before the events in his ‘Julius
Caesar’. True, Will Shakespeare was no more a professional historian than
George Martin is, for comparison, but he truthfully transcribes and depicts the
events described in his historical sources – they were not connected to the
politics and power plays of his day and age, so he could risk it. And
meanwhile, ‘Joker-2019’ tries to carefully depict the political realities on
USA-2019 (albeit on a national level), and-
And you can really reach only a limited amount of
conclusions. The first is already mentioned – that the downtrodden masses of
Gotham-2019 are sheep who will follow anyone who has the loudest voice and the
biggest, hardest shepherd’s staff with which to drive them into the kingdom of
God, however they depict it. The communists in the first half of the twentieth
century were especially like that, fully determined to drive humanity into some
sort of a happiness utopia with a steel hand. These days they are largely
vanished, with less than a dozen countries remaining true to this political
doctrine – at least right now. Is Joker himself a communist? No. Well, maybe. A
Bolshevik Joker decisively is not, but in the pre-revolutionary Russia there
were other political leftist parties, such as the Anarchists-Maximalists, who,
unlike their Bolshevik (and Menshevik, for that matter) counterparts didn’t
care about government and politics at all; they just wanted to bring it all
crashing down through sheer terror and overt assassinations, and then what will
be, will be. The poor people of Gotham-2019 show something decidedly similar to
such a political party – they just want to bring it all down, and then what
will be, will be. The only question is – just who is in the driver’s seat.
This brings us to the next theory – that Joker is a cat’s
paw, a stooge for someone else entirely. Think about it: Thomas Wayne is
running for mayor. This version of Papa Wayne is extremely unlikable (and is somewhat
reminiscent of the modern powerful men in light of ‘MeToo’ and similar
movements), but he has a political program, a concrete and specific political
program that he intends to implement when he is the mayor. However, guess what?
Concrete and specific political programs tend to drive away people as well as
attract them.
Thomas Wayne only told his true intention to the people of his
class, to his immediate inner circle? And where do you think the true
opposition to him began? Precisely, among the people of his class, of his
values, who, however, have different ideas of how things are to be ran and resources
to be shared and distributed than in Thomas Wayne’s vision.
Why didn’t they confronted him directly but rather did an
entire song-and-dance with Arthur Fleck/Joker? Who knows. They might have
misjudged the outrage and hatred of Gotham’s plebiscite, or they might have
intentionally started it all so that the army might move in and pacify everyone
in Gotham. They might be swept away with the old Gotham, or come on top of the
new city. ‘Joker-2019’ is intended to be a one-time movie with no sequel, a
latest depiction of Gotham City’s number one villain as well as a critique of
the Western society in 2019. As a piece of fiction, it is very good. As something
that tries to be more – not so much.
That is that for DC-world for the moment – ‘Joker-2019’ has
its issues, but it is still a deeper movie than ‘Gemini Man’ is, one that is a
self-love-fest for Will Smith. Kanye West is rightfully disliked for his narcissism
and his support of the Donald; Will Smith seems to be staying out of political
commentary for now, (not unlike Eddie Murphy), but ‘Gemini Man’? It is literally
all about Smith, and the man just does not do good movies. There had been ‘After
Earth’, that starred Smith and son, essentially, and it was just bad. ‘Bright’
the Netflix fantasy film had an interesting premise, but otherwise? Not that
much better than ‘After Earth’. And ‘Gemini Man’? It follows the previous two.
Unless you love Will Smith, ‘Gemini Man’ is not for you.
Finally, we come to the comics, because why not? Speaking of
movies, you remember how ‘Spider-man’ franchise left the MCU, returned to Sony,
but now is back in MCU on terms that favor Sony over Disney/Marvel? That’s
Disney/Marvel life action universe, which is founded on movies, TV shows and
streaming service shows & movies. What about the comics?
…In Marvel comics, fall 2019 is all about Carnage, one of
the nastiest villains in ‘Spider-Man’ in particular and Marvel comics in
general. Since the end of the summer 2019, Marvel comics went for the ‘Absolute
Carnage’ story arc, which is essentially about Carnage and a lot of other symbionts
taking over the Marvel universe, (well, trying to), with everyone else who had
ever had contacts/encounters with a symbiont getting involved. It is a tangled
mess, and then Spider-Man franchise was pulled out of MCU, and so the ‘Absolute
Carnage’ plotline hit a hiccup, as several comic book plot lines appear to have
been abandoned completely. Now that Spidey is back in in MCU, however
tentatively, those plot lines might resume soon enough, but regardless, unless you
are heavily investing, and closely following Marvel comics as such, it is not
worth it.
Well, this is it for now, see you all soon!
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