'Stuart' and 'Steps' - Sep 24

 Obligatory disclaimer: real life sucks, so let us talk about… what? The movies, lately, are something else – I’d my fill with Nolan’s Odyssey and Tom Holland’s Spider-Man for the moment – and the TV shows… the ‘Lanterns’ are an attempt to combine high-flung space sci-fi adventures and multicolored magic rings with ‘down and dirty’ detective work, and the result is something that seems to be satisfying no one in particular – people are watching it because it still beats real life – a low bar – and then there’s Stuart. He is failing to fix the universe, you see. Que the laugh track. Pause.

Let us start again. TBBT had its problems. It started as a sitcom, as the next version of ‘Friends’, but if ‘Friends’ were able to pull the plug and quit gracefully, TBBT didn’t, but turned into a sitcom version of a soap opera, since the regular cast allowed to achieve this through sheer size – 7+ people is a lot. Yet, nothing lasts forever, and so even TBBT ended. Hurrah!

…Well, of course not – this is real life. It sucks. TBBT branched off into ‘Young Sheldon’, (YS), which was supposed to be about the childhood of Sheldon from TBBT…but it quickly evolved into something else. The ‘adult’ Sheldon from TBBT fluctuated between a socially maladjusted and selfish man (who came to his senses with the help of not so much his friends as that of a good woman – i.e. Amy) and some sort of an autistic/’special needs’ character, (but TBBT quickly pulled the plug on this, thank you). Put otherwise, whatever the TBBT Sheldon is, conventional he is not, and not necessarily in a good way, either.

Meanwhile, what about the Sheldon in YS? Oh, he has the same problems… and he was dealing with them, and learning how to deal with them, and self-improving/improving with the help of others at a rate that the TBBT Sheldon never did. Put otherwise, if the two characters were the same one, a young and an adult version of the same Sheldon, then the adult Sheldon would never be either an entitled jerk, (if he’s conventionally sane), or a socially disturbed semi-victim (if he is not). No, he would be an ordinary person with an extraordinary IQ… i.e. not someone starred in a sitcom, but that is also important – YS was not really a sitcom, it was a family drama, delivered with a healthy dose of humor, but plenty of other emotions too. It was good, possibly better than TBBT – but it ended.

So, up came ‘The First Marriage of Georgie and Mandy’, designated to be about the first marriage of Georgie, the elder brother of Sheldon and Missy (his twin sister), to Mandy. The twist here is that Mandy is the older one – she is in her 30s, while Georgie is only in his 20s, but they are going to work it out, you will see!

…Since this is only their first marriage, clearly things won’t go as planned…but Georgie is given the ‘young Sheldon’ treatment here – he is already learning from his mistakes, making a divorce unlikely, so… welcome to the multiverse?

Ah yes, dear ole Stuart. He, his girlfriend Denise, best friend Bert, and worst enemy Kripke are travelling the multiverse, failing to fix it. Pause. In reality, they do not appear to be trying to fix anything at all – they are just lugging their huge dimension-jumping machine around the various dimensions, and that is it. Oh, sometimes they play coy by allegedly trying to find Leonard, Sheldon, or Howard, but no luck, and there is no one else that can fix it – just kidding. The original Stuart told his dimensional clones and their friends – at one point it is revealed that their multiverse is full of Stuart-Denise-Bert-Kripke teams that just run around doing diddlysquat – that only Leonard and friends can help them, and this is what they are trying to do. Given that the collective IQ of an average Stuart-Denise-Bert-Kripke team is about as high as a room temperature on a warm September day, this is not surprising. In addition, if a Stuart-Denise-Bert-Kripke (SDBK) would ask someone else for help, their collective stupidity would just create a bigger mess, as they would ask the completely wrong/inappropriate person entirely. Fun.

…Apparently, someone else thought so too for real, and now Stuart will fail to fix the universe for a second season, whenever that will air. It also means that the team SDBK will survive the S1 finale, so that is that for this intrigue. Frankly, when the bleeping Sonic Prime cartoon series (or whatever its’ name was), makes a better multiverse series than you, you really should take a pause and think it over.

In addition, speaking of the cartoons? Let us get back to ‘Steps’. We talked about it before – it is supposed to be a Netflix animated movie where the stepsisters are not wicked at all, but are quite nice to Cinderella. Well, for better or for worse we don’t see them interacting with Cinderella at all in the trailer people, but what we do see is that the movie won’t make them villains at all – a new character named Priscilla will be. In other words, this is less of a subversion, and more of a flat-out remake; it is going to be an original movie, put simply, and given that the same people who gave us K-POP Demon Hunters are making it, it just might work.

Or, it might not. Real life sucks, remember? But, for now, this is it. See you all soon!

Movies - June 20

 Obligatory disclaimer: real life sucks. Moreover, it is beginning to bleed into the media too.

Look at the movies, to be more precise. They are just going down. The Jurassic franchise? Surviving on games, which is separate, (in a manner of speaking, ok), from the films or the streaming series. The Planet of the Apes franchise? Also down to the ground. The upcoming Supergirl movie? It is the usual ‘cynical anti-hero find their wings and inner goodness to become the hero they were meant to be’. Given that ‘My Adventures with Superman’ cartoon has done this to Kara in S2 much more powerfully, there is no surprise that people are not too enthusiastic about the upcoming Supergirl movie. Not that DC had many options left – the CW Arrowverse Supergirl really rode the perky good-hearted superheroine aspect of this character to the hilt, making Supergirl look good too, so now the DC movies are trying to do something else with the character.

The Flashpoint Paradox live-action movie had a dark-haired Supergirl instead of Superman, which was not a bad idea, overall, but someone in the creative team behind the DC live-action movies decided that that idea was contaminated by Ezra Miller’s toxicity, so back to the blonde hair it is. Now Supergirl curses, swears, drinks, and the like, but never fear! Once push comes to shove, Supergirl will do what is right. …Whether the audience will appreciate it is another question. Next?

Well, this brings us to my main point of my rant: ‘Steps’. Pause. Here I mean not the stairs, (that is for Po Ping the Panda), but rather the upcoming Netflix movie. In this version of the Cinderella’s story, one of Cinderella’s stepsisters, (her name is Lilith), gets the fairy godmother’s wand, makes a hash of things, and has a tyrant named Priscilla take over the kingdom, so now she and Cinderella have to team-up to save it all. Pause.

Does this sound familiar? It kind of does. No, not the Lilith bit – thanks to the team Vivziepop the name of Adam’s first wife (in some religious traditions) is well known now. I am talking about the movie’s plot – it is heavily influenced by Disney’s movie ‘Cinderella 3: the Twist in Time’. There, Cinderella’s stepfamily stole fairy godmother’s wand and almost took over the kingdom, but never fear – one of Cinderella’s stepsisters, (Anastasia), reconsidered and helped Cinderella save the day. The delivery of ‘Cinderella 3’ and ‘Steps’ is different, but the latter was clearly influenced by the former. That said, while Disney’s movies often have plot twists, the plot of ‘Steps’ does not – not apparently. Rather, from the little we have, we will have Lilith help Cinderella defeat Priscilla and become a better person. The plot of ‘Kung Fu Panda 4’ did this sort of thing already. Still better than Disney. Pause.

Let me try again. Where is Disney in all of this? Making ‘The Stepsisters’, something new and edgy about Cinderella’s stepsisters, Anastasia and Drizella. It is supposed to be done a la ‘Chip and Dale Rescue Rangers’ reboot too. That particular reboot with Disney’s attempt to do something a la ‘Who Framed Roger Rabbit’ film. The original movie itself… is based on a book that has little to do with the film, and has its own fans and audience, not much more. The ‘Chip and Dale Rescue Rangers’ film – ditto; it made money, so Disney is keeping the crew busy with ‘The Stepsisters’ while it decides what to do next, and it can take a while.

Listen. Disney loves to make money. It hates losing money, and being involved in controversies and the like – even more. It wants to appeal to the sexual minorities, which is does by featuring them in various MCU properties, done in such a manner that they can be ‘cut out’ of the main MCU narrative and the latter doesn’t suffer; sexual minorities are the outlier, and the main heterosexual narrative is the main narrative.

Is Disney’s own universe, sometimes that cannot be done, as it was with ‘Raya and the last dragon’: there the same-sex relationship was plain to see. Therefore, Disney just ended that universe, the movie is a one-time, and it will remain a one-time, though Raya herself will appear in various other properties as a Disney princess. No girlfriend or anyone, though.

Conversely, there is the ‘Frozen’ franchise. The first film was quite traditional by Disney princess standards, with Hans being a traditional villain, albeit one with an open ending – he did not die, for one thing. However, ‘Frozen 2’ completely discard that story, having Elsa and her family go north, where they met Honeymaren Elsa’s not-girlfriend – right now Elsa is officially single, and as some person told us, she’ll remain single until she decides how she swings. I.e., Disney realized that they hit on something good with a blue-eyed blonde queen/princess/whoever and they do not want to ruin it by controversy. So they did not, Elsa remained conveniently single in ‘Frozen 2’, and now that the third and fourth movies of the ‘Frozen’ franchise are coming in the next few years, we will get to see what Disney does to poor Elsa next. Anything else?

Eh, ‘Cinderella 3’ made a bit of a mess itself, as it cancelled out the events in ‘Cinderella 2’. Maybe ‘The Stepsisters’ will fix it, or they may not. Netflix’s ‘Steps’ might be a fun fresh (relatively) take on the ‘Cinderella’ story, or it might just be an insipid and pointless generic piece of junk about a redemption of not quite a villain. We will just have to wait and see. Real life sucks, remember?

This is it for now. See you all soon!