Lady & Tramp 2019 - Nov 12

Obligatory disclaimer: real life sucks. In the ‘Canadian’ edition, this was demonstrated by Don Cherry, who was fired after he was carried away and said some distinctively politically incorrect & unsanctioned statements on the sports’ channel.

Here are the facts: as far as I can remember, Mr. Cherry was spouting this anti-immigrant bull-crap since the 1990s, and no one did anything about him. That said, under Mr. Trudeau’s leadership, the Canadian government changed its’ views on immigration, especially that of POCs, but there are plenty of Europeans also still coming to Canada, i.e. Ukrainians and the like. As the numbers of ‘new’ immigrants and their immediate descendants continues to grow and to accumulate, Mr. Cherry’s statements grow increasingly politically tone-deaf, and so he was given the old heave-ho, aka the boot. Will he be missed? I have no idea, but aside from his ‘political deafness’ the fact is that a sports’ channel isn’t the most appropriate place to discuss socio-political issues that aren’t related to sports at all, either.

No, seriously, Mr. Cherry did not even try to pretend that his rant is sports-related – he just vented his spleen, his own personal opinion, on his job. Seriously, man – get an online blog and do just that, rather than confuse it with your work. No wonder than he got fired – he is either politically incorrect and unprofessional, or old and marasmatic, (chronologically and biologically speaking). People are trying to pretend that this is an end of an epoch, but in reality, it is anything but – merely an old man, who either took his privilege too far, or who had simply lost ‘it’. Onwards to the TV shows?

…No, let us talk about a Disney+ movie – the 2019 remake of ‘Lady and the Tramp’. Unlike TLK-2019, Disney did not put this remake into theaters, but rather – into its’ own new and personal streaming service, aka Disney+. Yay?

Well, certainly ‘yay’ on a certain level – on some level, L&T-2019 is better than TLK-2019, in no small part because it does use real-life animals, (at least some times), and only adds CGI-facial features to them when it is necessary, rather than uses precise and accurate, (realistically authentic?) CGI models as they did in TLK-2019.

Of course, the difference is understandable: proportionally, domestic dogs, (used in L&T-2019) are much more trainable than the African lions and similar animals are, but regardless, it kind of makes TLK-2019 even more redundant, unnecessary and etc., when compared to L&T-2019 – honestly, what was Disney trying to prove with it? When ‘Dumbo’ was remade, for example, it was really remade – we’re talking about a different movie entirely from the old one, (which was good, because the original ‘Dumbo’ didn’t age well at all – just as Canada’s Don Cherry didn’t), whereas TLK-2019 wasn’t, not really: it was the same movie just with some cosmetic changes.

True, you can say the same thing about L&T-2019 – it is the same movie that was made in the 20^th century, but with some cosmetic changes – i.e., in the original film, it were some live beavers (from a zoo) that freed Lady from her muzzle, whereas in the 2019 version, it is a beaver statue in the park; or in case of the cats, in the original film, they were Siamese, (and also racial stereotypes, let’s be honest), while in 2019 they’re more like hairless Sphinxes, or some similar breed, (still creepy as Hell though), instead. Disney does know political correctness, it seems, but then we come to the human aspect and this is where things took a strange turn, as IGN noted on its’ own review of the movie.

I’m not the biggest fan of IGN these days – it seems to be at least partially paid by various movie companies to review its’ movies and give them ‘the right’ reviews; in a not-too-distant past someone was actually fired from IGN for given a ‘wrong’ review, but here we’re not talking about the ‘quality’ of reviews, but more about their content, what they’re talking about, and in case of the L&T 2019-reboot, it is the fact that Lady’s owners, are an interracial couple. Considering that L&T took place in the first half of the 20^th century or so, when interracial relationships and marriages were illegal in some countries and states, this is simply an anachronism – and also a case of ‘wokeness’ done wrong, not unlike as to how it happened back in ‘Dark Phoenix-2019’, (remember, the Mystique-Xavier interaction scene? Yeesh), only more blatantly so. This is nothing new for Disney, of course – for example, the current ‘Spider-Men’ films try to match up the Anglo-American Spidey with ‘people of color’ – Elizabeth Toomes, (herself a daughter of an Anglo-American father and an Afro-American mother) in ‘Homecoming’, and MJ herself in ‘Far From Home’ – but because these movies are good movies and are set in modern times, rather than in the past, unlike a ‘King Arthur’ or a ‘Robin Hood’ movie, this works.

Again, in real life, there are several aspects to the interracial issue, especially in North America. In Canada, I have seen plenty of interracial couples – on bus stops and in buses, in stores and on streets, and so on – and no one cares. Even Don Cherry seems to have issue not with the interracial aspect of immigration; rather he is rejecting all immigrants outright, by claiming that they are not true Canadians, but are rather taking advantage of them and Canada itself as a whole. This… is clearly the case of the horseradish that is as bitter as the bitter radish is, but while we seem to be splitting hairs between the rotten apples, it seems that Hollywood has gone the other way around, and lumped this current stage of social affairs with the past.

…The current state of casual interracial affairs has taken years, if not decades to develop, and both U.S. and Canada underwent a lot of hard effort to reach it. By comparison, in the time set in L&T, both the original and the remake, this effort – aka the integration – was not even in the works, though it must be acknowledged that it is there, sort of: we’re talking about a relationship between a ‘posh’ Lady and a ‘street-smart’ but ‘poor’ Tramp: a social interaction slash integration… minus the racial angle. In the 2019 remake, Disney tried to take this one-step further, to the modern level, but because the movie is still set in the past, it does not really work. God knows why, the movie is primarily about dogs, rather than people, they could’ve just set it in modern times and then an interracial human couple would’ve seen perfectly natural, but there you are, a genuine social anachronism in a Disney movie, one that not even IGN couldn’t ignore.

This brings us to the upcoming Sam & Bucky ‘Captain America’ Disney+ show, again because of the entire interracial issues in the USA. From what we were told, Sam & Bucky will not have it easy by transitioning to the new Cap – on one hand, MCU’s version of Zemo is coming back, complete with his trademark purple mask now, (but keep in mind, that in MCU he isn’t supposed to be Hydra, unlike in the comics), and on the other, we’re going to get introduced to MCU version of John Walker, the US agent. He is supposed to be one of those Captain America variants done wrong, who is violent and prejudiced and evil and so forth. I remember a comic arc when Cap encountered this sort of a character – it was Nuke. That comic arc was set in the so-called ‘Ultimate Universe’ (Earth-1610 if anyone cares), and so Nuke was Frank Simpson rather than William Simpson… as he is known in MCU. In MCU, Nuke/William Simpson was part of Netflix’s ‘Defenders’, but it does not mean that he could not appear in its’ other parts, (especially since his part in JJ was not that big, actually), but instead we are getting John Walker/US agent in Sam & Bucky. Fun.

…Rounding out the cast is MCU’s version of Sharon Carter, (agent 13), who, for a while, was supposedly a love interest for Steve Rogers, but sometime after the CA: CW film she just vanished from MCU. It will be interesting to see as for how long she will stick around this time. Anything else?

…Well, people are beginning to compare the conclusion of MLP: FIM series to MCU’s AoS, claiming that both shows used plot twists and turns incorrectly, but they are wrong. Rather, MLP: FIM is Hasbro’s answer to HBO’s GoT, as both were great and long-lasting shows that did more poorly in their finales, as both were about gone and done officially and for good, while pissing-off the fans in the process. …But it does not matter! They are over! Only not! They are still around! Hasbro is already talking about the G5 ponies, while HBO is already working on the Targaryen family saga, as presented by one George Martin, so yay, really. Pause.

We have steered far off course, and it is time for us to take a break. This is it for now, see you all soon, (hopefully).

Ad Astra - Sep 21

Obligatory disclaimer: real life sucks. So, let us talk about something different for a change – the 2019 movie ‘Ad Astra’. Warning, we are going to be talking about this movie at length, so today’s article will have plenty of spoilers! …Starring Brad Pitt and a fine-supporting cast, AA is… depressing as Hell, and makes some smart strategies by focusing on either close-up shots of the manly profile of Mr. Pitt, the amazing eyelashes of Ms. Negga, (which is one of the main reasons I went to watch AA, I admit), the hirsute face of Mr. Jones and son – or it making wide, far-sweeping, panoramic shots of space. Consequently, it manages to avoid the fact that its’ plot is rather sinewy and sickly, metaphorically speaking – and where to begin?

First, with the range of emotions – there really is not any. Mr. Pitt’s McBride-son, since he is the main character of AA – period, it is all about him and his father, (played by Mr. Tommy Lee Jones, again), everyone else are just passers-by in his life. No wonder that his wife, (played by Ms. Taylor),  has left him within the movie framework and is barely there from the script’s P.O.V. – she’s superfluous, you can replace her, say, by Ms. Negga’s character and the plot off AA will barely be affected. In an age of political correctness, this sort of male-centrism sounds kind of politically obtuse, but because it’s a space opera, no one seems to give a damn, plus September 2019 has given us ‘Hustlers’, so everyone might also be distracted by them too.

Back to emotions – there really are not any. None of the main characters display any. Between AoS and ‘Preacher’, as an example, we know that Ruth Negga can be very emotional, with a great range of facial features – but here we do not see any. To Tommy Lee Jones’ credit, he makes his McBride-father character sound like a major egotistical asshat without displaying any emotions: he may be completely deranged, in a captain-Ahab-like manner, but his face? About as emotionless as his son’s.

Moreover, this applies to the minor characters too. Finn’s Stroud, Ortiz’s Rivas and Hamilton’s Vogel appear only in one scene at the beginning, and this is it, yet they are have blank, featureless, emotionless faces that the rest of the cast also has. Mr. Donald Sutherland tries to make his character – Pruitt – to be more impressive, the heretic, but the good colonel is written out of the story by the end of the first third of the movie. That much for him.

…Actually, the good colonel’s character, (as in ‘movie character’ suffers another flaw): there is no back-story for him. When Mr. Sutherland first appears on screen, the audience may be distracted somewhat by his attempts to give colonel Pruitt some facial expressions, (and he succeeds, landing firmly in the ‘deranged owl’ territory of faces), but not enough not to miss that Pruitt and McBride-son have history together. Indeed, as the movie progresses, we learn that Pruitt and McBride-father have worked on the Lima project together, and there was a falling-out, and things ended badly between them. This is just a step in the process to make McBride-son realize that either something has went very badly and very wrong for his father, or his father isn’t the man that McBride-son always thought that he was – and that thought has driven McBride-son hard enough into making him into the man that he became by the beginning of the film.

However! None of the audience knows this, not immediately, and even after they do, all they see is a complete stranger, approaching Pitt’s McBride-son’s character and immediately hitting it off as the old friends that they supposedly are. In actuality, all that Sutherland’s Pruitt-character does is to give some cryptic info about McBride-father to McBride-son, as well as a memory stick with more cryptic info. And then he gets seriously shot and wounded by the space pirates on the Moon and was written out of the story.

Right. The space pirates. They were the random monster of the Moon arc. Because McBride-father had been a semi-deranged sociopath with a complete disregard for his fellow man, including his family and himself, but was presented to everyone as a dashing explorer and hero, things have to be very hush-hush for McBride-son to get to Neptune and retrieve him…only not. McBride-son had been lied to, and the military top brass decided that it was important for him not to know it, and that laid the seeds for the Martian portion of the movie, and its’ conflict.

Pause. On Mars, this is where the human b-story of the movie – McBride-son is going through the Solar System to discover the truth about his father, while various human factors try to help and hinder him – are the strongest. There, he gets some proof that his father is alive, but the military is cutting him out, because he has done his part and can be removed. Ruth Negga’s character – Helen Lantos – helps him get onto the rocket that goes after his father all the same… and it can be noted that while Helen Lantos is as bland and emotionless as McBride-son is, Ruth Negga is a good enough actress that you can almost see some of her Raina character fro, AoS shining through, as Lantos treats McBride-son not unlike how Raina treated Grant Ward at the final episodes of AoS S1 – but we’re not going there.

Instead, we are going off to Neptune. The remaining crew of that space ship, Cepheus, were actually government’s assassins, sent to off McBride-father, (and probably the son too), now that colonel Pruitt is out of commission and can no longer handle any McBrides. However, secondly, they are the most incompetent assassins, McBride-son is able to kill them despite his best intentions, which is sad, and firstly, there had been the Norwegian biostation in space. It sent out a mayday signal, and the then-captain of Cepheus decided to go there. There was a conflict with McBride-son, who wanted to get to Mars ASAP to continue to his quest for his father, but the then-captain of Cepheus channeled his inner child and told McBride-son very pointedly that this was his ship, so he’s the one who decides what their actions will be, so McBride can either tell them what’s the big rush to Mars is all about, or he can take over Cepheus and make all the choices himself. On one hand, this makes no sense – the crew of Cepheus were apparently in on the secret op – to find and destroy McBride-father, on the other, it is pointless: McBride was never the one to shirk responsibility, as the opening scenes of the movie showed: he put on a spacesuit and went forth to fix the robotic arm on the space station that he was upon, even though it wasn’t really his job, so the entire scene of getting McBride-son and the then-captain onto Cepheus is just painful.

But then they got onto the biostation and its’ monkeys. Monkeys come in all shapes, sizes and species, so some dumb-ass decided to use some of Earth’s biggest monkeys in an enclosed environment – drills. At 70 cm long, and weighing-in at about 50 kg, drills and their closest relatives the mandrills, are some of the largest primates there is, second only to the great apes in stature, but unlike them, and like their more distant baboon relatives, these monkeys are armed with powerful jaws and long sharp teeth – and have tempers to match.

…No, drills and mandrills are not baboons, though they are usually confused with them, ever since TLK-94, where Rafiki – a mandrill – not only had a baboon-like tail, but also ID’s himself as a baboon, (seriously, look it up on that video. It is right when he meets the grown-up Simba for the first time). AA’s drills also have them, as do the mandrills featured in the second Jumanji movie reboot. In real life, they only have short tails, not really noticeable in all that fur.

Back to AA and its’ space opera. As it was said already, some idiot decided to manage some of Earth’s biggest and strongest monkeys in an enclosed space, even though monkeys are very good at escaping their enclosures…which is why in real life, baboons, drills & mandrills aren’t really used in labs; instead, it is their macaque cousins, (such as the rhesus macaque), that are used there. Those primates aren’t as big and strong as the baboons, drills & mandrills are, and their teeth aren’t as big and sharp, but they can have ugly tempers, especially the sexual mature males – but where’s the blood? Aside from some scratches on the walls, (and monkeys don’t have claws, unlike big cats or bears, someone has really dropped the ball on their zoology there), there’s no blood or corpses, except for the first captain of Cepheus, who ran into the escaped monkeys on the space biostation and got his face ripped off for his trouble, because, yes, drills and mandrills are big enough and strong enough to do that – see above. So, why there aren’t more corpses?

Because either this was some sort of a trap for McBride after the moon pirate ambush failed, or it is a plot oversight. I am leaning towards the latter, but, still, common sense? You are going into space in an enclosed, closed, and self-sustaining space station, from which you cannot readily escape – and you are taking some of Earth’s biggest, strongest, and meanest monkeys with you. Obviously, there were some people alive long enough to send-out the mayday signal received by Cepheus, so something went even wronger after that – and it was the plot of AA.

Where were we? Oh yes, en route from Mars to Neptune. Some reviewers have hinted pre-release of AA that there is going to be a twist in the plot. After all the plot twists in MCU’s AoS, I was skeptical about this development, and I was right. The plot twist, apparently, was Space-Com’s turning onto the McBride family, as presented by three-slash-four of the most incompetent assassins that I have ever seen in movies and/or TV series. Some people point out that in this manner Roy’s journey mirrors his father’s – both men leave a trail of corpses in their wake even though they don’t intentionally mean to – but the way, for example, that Roy kills the assassins is really pitiful and annoying. Sometimes, McBride-son is more than competent enough to survive a crash alongside the crashing space station, to space-surf through the rings of Neptune, or to use the nuclear explosion of his father’s Lima project to jump-start his own journey home upon his now-battered space ship. However, when it comes to dealing with his father…

Now, let us not deny: McBride-father, Clifford, is a grade-a asshat, who abandoned his family, (namely, Roy and Roy’s mother, Clifford’s wife), in pursuit of his dream, of finding extraterrestrial life. He failed. In the world of AA, produced, co-written and directed by James Grey, there is no life on other planets, humanity is alone. Frankly, it makes the world of AA very depressing…which may be what Mr. Grey was planning all along, but we digress. The point is that Roy is smart enough, and competent enough, to do the above-mentioned feats of epic awesomeness and daring-do, yet he wasn’t smart enough to realize that his father might need some sort of meds, or to be subdued in some manner, or something, before they are going back home? Yes, Clifford is crazy enough, (or sane enough?) to play along until they are actually in space, after which he begins to fight his son tooth and claw, ready to kill both of them until Roy submits and cuts Clifford lose and off into the space he goes, where he has lived and killed and now will die. This very depressing, but is also a metaphor – Clifford is an albatross on Roy’s neck that needs to be cut loose for Roy to become a fully-rounded grown-up and get over his trauma of neglect. Sophocles’ king Oedipus rolls his eyes and gives Roy a Shirley Temple – lad, we have all been there, and you sure that your missus isn’t (kind of) reminiscent of your late mum? Sometime between concluding the Martian plot arc and starting the – Neptunian one, the movie’s script have done a complete turnaround, and rather than making the McBride-father a proper character, they reduced him to a plot device instead. Roy came to Neptune to prevent his (former?) superiors from killing his father and blowing up the Lima experiment – and he did just that on both counts. As far as plot twists go, this one ranks right there among the worst ones of MCU, for example, and we still have not hit upon one more very important plot hole.

Uranus. No, not ‘your anus’, be still my splitting sides, ha-ha, but Uranus, the seventh planet from the Sun, the one right there in the middle between Saturn and Neptune. Named after a figure in Greek mythology, the grandfather of Zeus and Hera, Uranus has the third largest planetary radius and the fourth largest planetary mass in the Solar System – a very notable planet, put otherwise. AA mentions it zero times and it is not shown at all in the entire movie, even though AA shows us some clear-cut shots of Jupiter and Saturn, never mind Neptune, which is the backdrop for the movie’s final act. What gives? It is a planet, so political correctness cannot be blamed for this one, (it may meddle with all sorts of aspects of Western life, but astronomy? Not so much), so I’m guessing that Mr. James Gray, who was making AA into the movie that was completely Sad and Solemn and Serious just couldn’t endure the thought that people in the audience will have involuntary chuckles when they hear the word ‘Uranus’ and promptly refused to have anything with the movie until the offending name, and the offending planet, were removed from the script, period. Consequently, ‘Ad Astra’ takes place in some alternate universe, where Earth is a part of Solar System that has no Uranus either because it never been in the first place, (yes, the formation of the Solar System and etc. during the Big Bang as we know it was touch and go during that initial time period), or because humans have blown it up somehow. And before you say that it’s impossible for our race slash species to blow up an entire planet I can only say that a) we haven’t invented the right way to do it yet, and b) we haven’t tried yet either, intentionally or otherwise. That said, if in the world of AA humanity did manage to blow up Uranus to a point where not even space/ice dust was left of it, (in real life, Uranus, just as Neptune, is an ice giant, whereas Jupiter and Saturn are gas giants, and Pluto isn’t even a planet anymore according to some sources), you would think that at some point of the movie this would’ve come up, because, hey, it’s an entire planet!.. Anything else?

No, that is it, actually. AA is a movie that has no humor, very little normal social interactions, is intentionally depressing as f- Hell, and sometimes unintentionally bizarre. Characters have no back story, they come and go in the great epic that is life and times of Roy McBride, just as they did in an equally great epic that was the life and times of Clifford McBride, an insane murderous fanatic and sociopath, (but hey! Product placement of NatGeo magazines! Money talks, baby!), so by cutting his father loose, literally and metaphorically, Roy now gets the chance to be his own man – a surprisingly small and simple message for such a pretentious movie.

…This is it for now, see you all soon!

S.H.I.E.L.D. 'Leap' - July 19

Obligatory disclaimer: real life sucks. Sometimes you seem to get what you want, but the price is not what you have expected; karma just might be real, and if you try to play it…it will be played, but so will you. There is a reason as to why Gandalf tended to downplay his magical skills, and he was a Maiar, i.e. – not a human at all, more like a demigod that inhabited a human shell – but more on that later.

As we suffer from family problems and other issues, we turn to the magical world of make-believe to make us feel better, and what do we discover there? Disney is owning a large part of National Geographic franchise, which is why the latter is advertising TLK-2019, a movie so…unsatisfying, that there’s a man on YouTube, who made a video about 30 minutes long if not slightly more so, just ranting about how bad TLK-2019 is.

…TLK-2019 is not the best movie of 2019 so far, but neither is it the worst; it certainly does not deserve a 30+ minute rant either. If you do not like it, that is fine; the fact that the bloody Disney owns a large part of NatGeo franchise – not so much. Seriously, what does the House of Mouse want? To become real life’s analogue of the SW empire? Yeah, not cool, not cool at all.

Looking away from TLK-2019, which is an inferior remake of the 1994 film with some variant dialogue that doesn’t do anything, we see… the trailer for the upcoming ‘Cats’ movie… and what in seven Hells did we see?

Well, from a literal P.O.V. we have seen a number of famous actors and actresses singing around in digitalized anthropomorphic cat suits, singing and dancing. And why were they singing and dancing in digitalized anthropomorphic cat suits? Only the Lord knows. Well, maybe Nick Fury – the original Nick Fury – also does, but we’ve been already subjected to the above-described spectacle, even if in the previous incarnations of ‘Cats’ the cast wore real-life, regular cat suits and make-up, and it was just fine. ‘Cats’ is a musical, after all, so who the Hell cares about the suits, beyond their basic function of them?

…As for the main plot of ‘Cats’… listen. It’s a bunch of cats – literally speaking – who come together as a single tribe and debate via song and dance as to who will ascend to Heaven (for that is what it is, even it’s called differently here), and be reborn into someone new. Guess all of them are out of their nine lives or something, because otherwise? It makes even less sense than it does in the canon – but that is okay. It is a musical. It does not supposed to make sense! There already was an attempt to adapt it into a movie format, and it was not very successful – it was a direct-to-video format, and that never really works. Why should Cats-2019 be better? As TLK-2019 shows, a movie cannot get ahead on CGI alone; TLK-1994 is still the better version out of the two, (so far; maybe in another 25 years we will get TLK-2044 or something).

In addition, you must remember that ‘Cats’ is a musical, and they don’t transform into movies too well from the start. Does anyone remember the latest one, not a biopic of Barnum Brown or someone like that? Judging by the crickets chirping – no. There is no indication that Cats-2019 will endure any better, ‘Cats’ or no ‘Cats’.

I remember when Cirque du Soleil made a film, about human life from birth to death. The first dance was depicting the – fertilization of an egg by sperm; then the protagonist’s childhood; his first love, depicting by two statues dancing, (we’re talking a heterosexual couple here, BTW); then his maturity; then the scene where a bunch of proletarian types (the turn of 20^th century, here), confront the protagonist in his mansion; and the final scene, our protagonist, now an old man, leaving with a crowd of children for Heaven or someplace similar. All of the above was executed by nothing but dance and music. After going through it, I promptly went to the radio and listened to contemporary pop songs (J-Lo – at that time she was more of a singer than an actress unlike these days) until I returned to normal. There’s only so much edgy progressive culture that I can take – and movie musicals like that Barnum Brown piece, ‘Rocketman’ (sort of), and the upcoming Cats-2019 (we’re talking December of this year), have all that plus singing. What joy. Not. It’s really almost enough to make a blogger return to real life… just in time to see and hear POTUS the Donald open his maw and emit a series of racist insults that have no business being emitted by a POTUS; you motherfucking Yankees, impeach him now!

Try to escape back into mass media? To AoS, to be more precise? Oh wait, AoS is being cancelled at last – the upcoming 7^th season will be its’ end. So far, AoS is trying to give all that it has…more recycling, this time of the Ghost Rider plot arc. Further compounding the situation is the fact that Gabriel Luna does not appear to be returning to AoS, especially for the finale of S6 – he is busy preparing for his own ‘Ghost Rider’ TV series… Gregg is doing the best he can, playing a Coulson clone that has Ghost Rider powers… AoS has officially jumped the shark. It made sense for Luna and his character – Robbie Reyes – to return to AoS back when a fear dimension that is not a fear dimension after all, but he never did. Rather, Deathlok made his obligatory appearance – one per AoS season or even less – and that was the end of that. Only it is not, and Izel is about to take over the world via her alien space bats…sorry, shrikes. In real life, shrikes are carnivorous songbirds with some rather gruesome and disturbing feeding habits: when they catch a small animal, they impale it on a thorn, and strip flesh from the impaled corpse at their leisure. Real life can be stranger than any science fiction, and for North America, there are two main species of shrike, the loggerhead and the northern shrikes – but we have digressed.

No, not really. Not unlike S5 and especially S4, AoS is trying to combine several plot lines into one, just in time for the explosive mid-season finale. Yes, it is supposed to be the season finale, but this is just AoS being cute, among other things. They are losing cast members again – agent Davis has apparently died for good – and the numbers still are not so high, and the enthusiasm is on the decrease, now that the cast and the crew know that the gravy train has almost ended. Will AoS end up in an equally big mess as the last two seasons of GoT did? Since this week’s episode – ‘Leap’ – forgot/ignored about Snowflake’s existence completely, odds are that yeah, they will be, forgotten coffee cups and water bottles aside.

…So, for now, this is it. See you all soon, people!

PS: Do not try to play the karma, please, unless you are that sort of a wizard/cleric/theurge. If you are – go ahead; if you are not – eventually you will lose control and then it will be really bad for everyone.

Now – see you all soon!

MCU Spider-Man - Lion King with thumbs? - July 16

Obligatory disclaimer: real life sucks. Otherwise, where are we?

…Apparently, as we put ‘Spider-Man: Far From Home’ behind us, and TLK-2019 is in front of us, now we are in the perfect time to proclaim: the current incarnation of Spider-Man, the Tom Holland version, is TLK, just with opposable thumbs and different hairdos. Let us begin!

Peter Parker is Simba, with Tony Stark being Mufasa; previously, it was the late uncle Ben who’d been Peter’s father figure, but in the MCU, it’s more of Tony’s job; so far, the closest we came to Ben Parker is the BFP suitcase that Peter took upon his European vacation; we don’t even know how he looks.

…This isn’t actually such a great deviation: we still know next to nothing about Peter’s actual parents: his uncle Ben and aunt May had been present with us, alongside Peter, in all sorts of incarnations, but the actual Parker parents? Not so much. Adding Tony into the mix did change the balance…but not as much as it appears at a first glance. Tony is still Peter’s mentor and father figure, and he rescues Peter from the Vulture, (at first), just as Mufasa rescues the young Simba from the hyenas. Young Simba and Peter even have similarly optimistic and carefree attitudes pre-Vulture and the elephant graveyard, respectively – Peter may not have a musical number similar to ‘I just can’t wait to be king’ of Simba, but I kind of got a feeling in ‘Homecoming’ that if he could he would.

Same for the women – Simba got Beyoncé… that is to say, Nala, and Peter got Zendaya… uh, MJ. Yes, them. Do not know if that is woke or just personal preferences, but there it is, and both Nala and MJ are presented as having similarly spunky personalities, so to say. Yay?

Timon and Pumba in Africa and by Betty and Ned in NYC/Europe round up the entourage of our titular heroes. Zazu (Oliver) is balanced by Happy (Favreau), who, yes, got May to balance him out for further MCU romance, but honestly? That romance was the weakest of the three in ‘Far From Home’ and rather reminiscent of Ned & Betty back in Europe.

Both fathers die and are succeeded by villains, Scar and Beck. Both of whom are hypocrites, liars, and are especially successful at misguiding the titular heroes, in different manners but with similar results – Scar becomes king on one hand, and Mysterio gets the unlimited access to Stark’s technology on the other. Hyenas assist Scar, Mysterio got his own minions; hyenas turn on Scar, Mysterio’s minions just outlive him as Spider-Man defeats him for the final time…supposedly.

And then there are the sagely old advisors that take shit from no man or lion, Nick and Rafiki. Rafiki is more polite and subtle than Nick is, but conversely, he is more physical with Simba than Nick is with Peter.

Pause. Yes, Nick is actually Talos, while Maria is Soren, or is she?

Let us look away from Spider-Man to ‘Captain Marvel’ and one person that you do not see there is Maria Hill. At all. Maybe she was just busy elsewhere, or maybe she just had not been hired by S.H.I.E.L.D. in the 90s, or something else, but maybe there is no Maria Hill, but only Soren, pretending to be human. If so, then you have to admit that she is one kick-ass S.H.I.E.L.D. agent, is all that I am saying.

It also alters the disposition of both the initial two seasons of AoS and the very first Avengers movie, (aka the one where Loki invades Earth with Thanos’ army). As humans, Fury and Hill may have had only the slightest idea, as to what the GH formula will do to Coulson, (it was made based on Kree blood, remember?). As Skrulls, Talos and Soren may have had a much better idea, and then there is the issue of how does the rebooted post-Hydra and cap revelation S.H.I.E.L.D. fit into the entire Kree vs. Skrull conflict. At the end of ‘Far From Home’ film, there are mentions of Kree cells on Earth. Sigh. Looks as if Kree will be replacing Hydra as the main secondary villain in MCU and possibly AoS.

…Here is the thing. From AoS S3 onwards, Hydra and the Kree were increasingly mashed together, until the final quarter of AoS S5, where the Hydra were revealed as being the minions of the Kree. Yes, it contradicts the second half of AoS S3, where Hydra was supposedly founded by Alveus, who was an InHuman or an alien space worm, rather than a Kree, and who really didn’t like them, but that’s AoS for you: it had its’ back story broken and reset about as many times as ‘Lost Girl’ had, only ‘Lost Girl’ was finished after five seasons; AoS is currently in its’ sixth. Yay, really.

That aside, at that period MCU and AoS were in a bad place, as their fan base were divided over whether Hydra was Nazi or only evil, whether S.H.I.E.L.D.’s treatment of Grant and Kara was justified, who was in the right – the Iron Stark or Cap’n Rogers… wait, sorry. The Iron Man and/or Captain America – there, that is the correct versions, right? Anyhow, the Hydra issue proved to be much more divisive than MCU imagined it to be, so around the time of CA: CW movie they retired it from MCU as well as from AoS – we are talking the S3 finale here. Only by the second third of AoS S4 Hydra came back in a different incarnation… as opposed to the second half of S5, where it was in its’ classical depiction instead: apparently, MCU cannot really function well without Hydra, yet with it, the old controversies come back. Whereas SW tried to just steamroll over them and it backfired, MCU is trying to fix them – first it tried to get rid of Hydra, and now it is trying to replace it with the Kree. Squee, and let us see as to how it will work out for Marvel. Back to the main topic?

Both Peter and Simba struggle with their fathers’ death, both Scar and Mysterio try to make them worse with verbal bullshit, and both times it backfires – Simba learns that it was actually Scar who had murdered Mufasa and is able to overpower him and throw him off the Rock where the hyenas turn on him and tear him to pieces, while Peter gets his own shit together, gets to Mysterio, and overpowers him, even as the latter’s handgun misfires and he dies. What next?

Simba gets to be king. Peter gets to be a true hero slash Avenger for real, finally. Of course, nothing good lasts forever and Peter know gets to deal with the new incarnation of the Daily Bugle, as well as any other shite that comes his way, (such as MCU’s version of the Scorpion), while Simba will eventually have to deal with Scar’s widow and children in TLK2 movie, (which hadn’t been re-worked with CGI yet). Go them, I say!

What next? Hard to say. No Marvel movies are coming in the next 10 months or so, and AoS is being all over the place; plus real life sucks, so it’s doubtful that we will be able to discuss AoS in the upcoming weeks, especially the end of July and the beginning of August, but what can’t be cured, must be endured, right?.. And Disney in general is in a similarly confused place, seeing how it is has driven itself in a difficult situation with those remakes of its old classics, rather than making genuinely new movies, as it has done in MCU and SW. At least Spider-Man has returned to his roots, faced his fears, and became a hero after trying to avoid it, just as Simba did in his movie. Hakuna matata!

…This is it for now, see you all soon.

S.H.I.E.L.D. 'Collision Course II' - July 12

‘Collision Course Part II’ is over. And?

First, the obligatory disclaimer: real life sucks. It can suck for many reasons; one of them is that you may have a mindset just cannot enjoy the present as it constantly remembers the future just lurking around the metaphorical bend; your life, and your time, start in the future, become present for a brief moment and then vanish in the distance of the past, of what-have-been, and there’s nothing that you can do about it. Well, nothing that is not stupid or illegal, anyhow. Where were we?

Sarge’s plans have failed, his crew, except for Snowflake, are dead, though given how AoS treats its’ guest stars, it’s only a matter of time until she’s dead one way or another. Moreover, agent Davis seems to have succumbed to something at the end of the episode, and since Izil doesn’t appear to be dead, (Hell, spoiler alert – she’s coming to Earth proper in the next week’s episode), odds are is that he had been infested by Izil’s alien space bats back on the space ship. On one hand, it is sad, Davis has grown on the audience, some, since his appearance in the S3 (or 4), but on the other…see Snowflake above. Odds of him and Kim dying as AoS S6 is coming to yet another climax are good, ‘good guys’ need to lose some people to make the show look real, or whatever. What next?

Well, there had been ‘Stranger Things’ S3, which introduced the Russian/Soviet threat into the mix, because of course it did. Modern incarnation of Russia, the Russian Federation, is trouble whatever way you look; the problem is that USA seems to be looking at it through some sort of a history lens full of Cold War semi-nostalgia, and it’s a wrong approach on top of everything else.

What is going on the RF? Putin worked in the KGB, in Eastern Germany; his training was oriented more outwards than inwards, and it shows: he works RF’s foreign policy very well, but what is going on in the country is something else, and that something is bad. However! Since US is also treating it as some sort of an inconvenience or a distraction, (not unlike how they are currently using Epstein, the bastard), Putin can get away with anything – for a while. Then, when his time is up, anything can happen; for example, ‘his people’ can rip him apart as they did with the Imposter in the 17^th century and scatter the pieces all over Moscow, as they did in the past. USA has its flaws, but it is very much a more civilized country than RF is, so USA! USA!

…On the other hand, Georgia (we’re talking the Caucasian country here, not the American state), has come out the loser here: it tried to provoke RF into something stupid, and all it did was cause civil unrest within itself, and sanctions from RF from without – and USA, alongside EU and the rest of the ‘Western world’ promptly ignored it, though it did appear worried that the civil unrest will cause their gay pride parade to be cancelled. RF’s oppression of the minorities is bad; the way that USA aggrandizes them to be used for profit (both private and governmental) is not better.

Back to ST S3? Not really. Aside from them Cold War feels, all it really has is a plot line out of an RPG, and we’re talking Dungeons & Dragons or its’ forgotten cousin, the d20 Modern, rather than Pathfinder/Starfinder. God knows why, but there it is. People seem to love it, but if so, more power to them; we played enough D&D 3.5 to have our fill of mind flayers, and hydra variants, and Demogorgon and his thralls to last us without going back to screens to watch ST instead of anything else…

This ‘anything else’ brings us to TLK 2019, and… it was uninspiring. Both the remade B&B and ‘Aladdin’ brought something new to the viewers; the remade ‘Dumbo’ might have even been too new judging the audiences’ reaction, but TLK 2019? Not new enough. It is the other way around, really.

The problem is that of all Disney movies it is the least anthropomorphic; Disney’s original ‘Jungle Book’ movie had humans to diversity the animal cast, while ‘Robin Hood’ was directly anthropomorphic; really, a direct ancestor to ‘Zootopia’. (And ‘Sing’, I suppose). If Disney tried to utilize the variant ‘Hamlet’ script it wouldn’t really be a problem, and not just because ‘Hamlet’ was about as historically accurate as ‘Robin Hood’ is, you know? However, TLK is about ordinary animals executing a human-level complexity script, and that is already problematic, since ‘Hamlet’ does not really fit African realities, (animal or otherwise), to begin with. When it comes to Marvel, or SW, or even human-based movies, such as TLM, ‘the Princess and the Frog’, and etc. that isn’t really a problem, because there’s only so much realism can be instilled into a world where people turn into animated candlesticks and clocks, beasts, and frogs, but TLK? It was also the most realistic Disney movie to begin with, since – no magic. Oh, Rafiki is clearly a shaman or a witch doctor of the world, but even in the original TLK, his magic was kind of subdued and subtle, especially by children’s standards, (just look at ST and what passes for magic there).

…And now remove the quirks of the old 90s animation, replace everything with the 2019’s computer wizardry, and suddenly you get… real life animals that talk in English (or whatever other language spoke in the countries where TLK 2019 is running), and also acting with human motivations – and it does not mesh. In Canada, the Mirvish theatre performs its’ version of TLK on a regular basis – and we are talking human actors acting on stage in real life, just dressed in various costumes. This works, because TLK characters are driven by human motivations; they are humans in animal skins, and making those ‘skins’ look like their real life counterparts doesn’t help. TLK 2019 is not a flop, but the 90s version was still the better one.

Back to AoS? Not really, it would be nice to think that Sarge and Snow have some sort of an evil Ward and Kara dynamic, but odds are that this was already done in S4 by LMD May and Coulson, so there is that. The show still doesn’t know what to do about Daisy and Deke; it is trying to put them together, but only half-heartedly; if Snowflake dies – when Snowflake dies – it should push their relationship further together, but we have no idea just how much do the actors want this to happen, and what is going on behind the scenes? (Other than Jeff/Deke apparently hating Iain/Fitz). We will just have to wait and see, I guess.

…This is it for now; see you all soon!

Mulan 2020 first trailer - July 7

Now you may ask – and what about the first trailer of the ‘Mulan’ 2020 remake? Since we have already mentioned the upcoming ‘Little Mermaid’ remake and ‘The Lion King’ remake is coming out later this month.

Firstly, the ‘Little Mermaid’ remake. There shouldn’t be a problem having an Afro-American actress being the titular character – as MCU’s ‘Spider-Man’ movies and Disney’s ‘Aladdin’ remake have shown, race is by no means a defining feature of a movie character, but! Then there was J-Ro’s ‘Harry Potter and the Cursed Child’, remember it? Both Hermione and Rose Weasley were played by Afro-American (Afro-British?) characters, and it didn’t work; J-Ro herself has abandoned that aspect of her HP-verse and is currently playing with Newt Scamander and co.; true, both movies had POC as actors, but if you compare it to, say, ‘Crazy Rich Asians’, then you notice that J-Ro’s movies are notably underwhelming in that department. For its’ part – and that is just as important – Disney’s remakes are at their best, when they follow close the original animated movies, with just some differences, as ‘Aladdin 2019’ and the previously aired ‘Beauty and the Beast’ remake showed. When differences are much greater, as they were in the ‘Dumbo’ remake, then Disney begins to have problems. So far, TLK seems to be like the original movie; TLM, judging by the trailers and teasers that we have seen – not so much, (though they were sketchy, fair enough), so we will have to wait and see. This brings us to ‘Mulan 2020’, only not.

First, there is also the honorable mention of the Ghostbusters remake; no, Disney did not make it, but it was a remake, and it failed. It was really quite ironic – there were all those people arguing pro and contra, if the gender-flip of the original Ghostbusters film was worthwhile – and then the movie flopped on its’ own merit, and that’s the end of that aspect of the Ghostbusters franchise, as opposed to, say, the comic crossover between them and TMNT, when the Shredder had killed some rival crimelord, and the latter’s restless spirit returned as a ghost, and TMNT had to team with the Ghostbusters, because their skills aren’t really effective against a ghost… the Ghostbusters’ franchise is working out quite well, thank you very much, movie flop or no flop.

This brings us to ‘Mulan 2020’, to TLK 2019, to TLM, and the abovementioned point – racial issues do not matter, plot matters. ‘Mulan 2020’ is rumored to be very much reworked from the original 90s’ animated feature, meaning that it might have problems in 2020 when it comes to the big screen. Those problems probably will not be exclusive to racial matters or cultural appropriation, but Disney may pretend that they are, as they tried to do with their SW films, and that now will be a bad idea: Disney/SW merger may end at the end of the SW9 movie…or rather, the current incarnation of SW franchise will. The merger itself will go on for a while, as the numerous SW comics are indicating: the juggernaut is intently trying to change the public opinion regarding the rebooted SW before the SW9 film comes out…with mixed success. Of course, Disney princesses as a whole have their own comic series already, but that is different – SW, proportionally, is a much more popular and more bought franchise out of the two… but let us wait first until TLK comes out later this month (July 2019) before we make any assumptions…

This is it for now; see you all soon!