The BLACK PANTHER: WAKANDA FOREVER trailer.

BLACK PANTHER: WAKANDA FOREVER has fighting, Namor, my personal favorite character from the first movie (M’Baku) – and an almost tangible sense of sorrow for the loss of Chadwick Boseman, who was a genuinely good-hearted man and actor who was taken from us too, too soon. Everybody in that film misses him, and I don’t think they’re going to pretend otherwise. I think it was very smart that they didn’t recast the role.

I finished MS. MARVEL.

I liked it. MS. MARVEL is fun, in the same that THE UNBEATABLE SQUIRREL GIRL is fun: the people making it fundamentally like comic books, and not for what can be done with them for [INSERT PET CAUSE HERE]. The main character is endearing and the action is good, while being as nonviolent as you can when people are throwing giant balls of solidified energy around. I assume that all of this ends with Young Avengers, or something, and that’s cool.

All in all, I had a good time. Not my favorite Disney+ series (LOKI was my favorite), but definitely fun.

So, I watched the first episode of MS. MARVEL.

Actually, I liked it. MS. MARVEL is very fannish, which will not appeal to some; and some of the superheroine’s devotees are rather intense about their fandom*. But this show itself was fun. They’re going with ‘magical artifact’ rather than ‘mutating gas’ for the power origin, because… I dunno. Because cramming mutants into the MCU, however hand-waved, is gonna be hard at this point, I guess.

Continue reading So, I watched the first episode of MS. MARVEL.

The strategically pixelated THOR: LOVE AND THUNDER trailer.

Worried that THOR: LOVE AND THUNDER might be a solemn affair? Concerned that the general ‘Jack Kirby drops some acid but was able to maintain’ vibe of the original might have been an one-time thing? Unsure whether Chris Helmsworth has gone off the Marvel boiled-chicken-and-Sisyphus exercise routine?

Then do I have a trailer for you.

It’s dumb and I love it.

Finished up HAWKEYE today.

Chewing through all the MCU stuff I haven’t seen yet, because tomorrow or Sunday is gonna be DOCTOR STRANGE. After this, I watch ETERNALS tonight, which should catch me up completely. Probably unnecessary, but what the heck. I should relax sometimes.

Anyway, HAWKEYE was fun. I worried going in that Kate Bishop would be written as this god-tier replacement who would show Clint Barton how it’s really done, but instead we got a buddy cop series. Or ‘buddy secret agent’ series, maybe? Anyway, Clint doesn’t need to be taught the power of friendship, because he’s well aware how powerful it is; so powerful, in fact, that it’s left a few pieces behind in his soul. And Kate is commendably bandaged and rumpled by the end of the series; perfect, she is not.

All in all, HAWKEYE is a fun series that reminds itself on a regular basis that, geez, it’s Christmas. I should have finished it earlier.

#commissionearned

Finished up MOON KNIGHT.

Good show. Good show. The final episode had to tie up a bunch of stuff together, and – pious protestations by the MOON KNIGHT folks aside – they absolutely laid the bricks for a second season. I didn’t read the comics, but the people who did all seem pretty jazzed at how much stuff from them were in the series.

Is MOON KNIGHT the best of the Marvel Disney+ series? Tough call: LOKI in particular still gives it a run for its money. But those two were the only shows that I made to sure to watch on the day of release. That’s probably diagnostic.

The Fantastic Four Curse lives.

Although this is fairly benign: “ Jon Watts has withdrawn as the director of Fantastic Four, the reinvention of the venerable Marvel Comics series at Marvel Studios and Disney. Watts just directed Spider-Man: No Way Home, the Sony Pictures and Marvel Studios film that grossed $1.89 billion to become the sixth highest-grossing film of all time.” Apparently Watts is just ready to take some time off from making superhero movies, given that he spent most of the teens making highly successful Spider-Man flicks for Sony*.

So… back to the drawing board on finding a director for Fantastic Four. …Yay. I’m never getting a good F4 flick, am I?

Moe Lane

(H/T: ComingSoon)

*Don’t know if I blame him, although even I did blame him, he still wouldn’t be able to hear me over the sound of all that MONEY.

#commissionearned

5/6 of MOON KNIGHT done…

…and it’s very possibly the best Marvel series Disney+ has done to date. MOON KNIGHT started messed up, and it’s kept it up since then; and, given how Hollywood* the hero’s mental illness is, it’s doing a pretty good job giving you the feeling of what kind of trauma’s he’s going through. It could still blow up the ending, but we’ll know next week.

This would have been an absolutely awful movie, by the way. There’s no way you could do this in two hours without it being far too rushed. But as a six-part miniseries MOON KNIGHT works.

*Which is to say: gratuitously and cinematically incorrect.