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I used to be like "Yeah, they're dumb, but at least they're entertaining"
Then Black Panther came out and I was like "Oh, it's literally just Anti-Left propaganda" when instead of helping the world, Wakanda just built a youth center
And a good guy CIA officer helps save the day! Just like in real life. O wait.
One should not forget the CIA’s clandestine role in Africa either:
It is linked with Patrice Lumumba’s assassination in Congo. A survey of declassified US government documents notes that the CIA “initially focussed on removing Lumumba, not only through assassination if necessary but also with an array of non-lethal undertakings.”
The CIA is suspected to have overthrown Ghana’s first President Kwame Nkrumah in a military coup in 1966 while he was out of the country. Nkrumah wrote a book outlining his suspicions in a 1978 book, where a former CIA intelligence officer supported this theory.
It is alleged that the CIA overthrew Chad’s president in 1982, replacing him with the brutal Hissene Habre.
The CIA also tipped off the South African apartheid regime of Nelson Mandela’s location in 1962, leading to his imprisonment for nearly three decades.
Taken from Medium, but there's probably a better, more comprehensive article about this.
maybe this is kind of a trite observation, but... there's no collective action in superhero movies. it's like how we're supposed to rely on elected officials and businessmen to run things. like... if only we could get the right elected official, the right businessman, we'd all be saved.
Superheroes are also generally assumed to be unaccountable to the public and beyond any international regulations. They're simply morally better than everyone else and know when to use violence to solve social ills.
I tend to prefer the X-men as the only superhero team that makes for a compelling narrative. They're defending themselves out of necessity, since the alternatives are being made into weapons of the state or facing genocide. Also not all of the mutants are on the same side, since they're all subject to different conditions. I need to find that one comic I only half remember where I think Rocket Raccoon is talking to a cop and says something like "Don't worry, I'm in the X-men" to which the cop starts pulling out his gun. "I mean the Avengers" Cop puts his gun back.
Oh hey, there it is! I remembered more of it than I thought I did.
I feel like a majority of American media reaffirms all these reactionary ideas. Like these superhero movies implicitly saying you can only change things if the right person comes along to fix it or if you go through the proper channels (great man theory). Like think of a white suburbanite's interaction with the cops, you would have next to no contact with them, and if you did, it probably wasn't shitty. Then our suburbanite goes and watches CSI on network TV or Die Hard or even Family Guy with the character Joe, who is a cop. They all show the mythological cop who protects citizens and stops crimes as they happen. This media concludes that cops are good people. And then most people are too tired after work to do anything besides tune out and watch TV.
We already know how much the military and DOD has influence over movies and the nfl. That was annoying as shit trying (and failing) to burst that bubble of chud family about how astroturfed the Colin Kaepernick and kneeling at football games controversy was.
If you don't challenge your beliefs or do any material analysis on these things or even talk to people who do say cops are problematic, for example, then with how pervasive and not subversive the media is, then of course we get liberals who refuse to believe reality might be different than what they think it is. You don't see too many movie plots of people collectively realizing something's bullshit and that they have the collective power to stop the bullshit.
what we need is a billionaire to spend millions of dollars on tacticool gear and then he brutalizes criminals in a dark alley
this is why old not gritty Justice League was good. Individual superheroes band together and do collective more gooder.
two thoughts
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Watchmen could have been amazing with a better director
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as the status quo gets worse and worse, the appeal of some doofs in tights trying to "uphold" it without helping working people gets dumber and dumber
Watchmen as a comic was written specifically to be a comic. It would need a massive rewrite to work as a film. Otherwise the impact is muddled. I can elaborate on that sometime if anyone cares
For real, I feel like people who think it can be filmed haven't read the comic, which they should do and it takes like a few hours tops. You can for sure do the overall story as a movie but the way it's formatted really tells half the story, it was meticulously designed to work as a comic and really can't be altered from that medium without losing a lot
Yeah, in pretentious terms it's ergodic, like the book Pale Fire. It's structured for the reader's ability to flip back and forth between pages, consult previous issues, and overall not be limited by a linear perception of the story's events. Also things like the speech bubbles. Rorschach has jagged, malformed bubbles in the present which the reader could interpret as his mask or a scratchy voice. But then the scenes in the 60s show Rorschach with normal speech bubbles, then he has normal ones again when not wearing his mask. I don't know how that particular aspect could be shown in a film. The 2009 movie just had him do a throaty Batman voice throughout the whole thing.
That's just some minor examples too. Alan Moore is an obsessive madman genius.
I like reading Rorschach with a Reddit debate bro kinda voice. They shouldn't have given him a cool voice. Zack Snyder fucked a bunch up. Theres also the details in the panels that would be hard to do on a moving format
The extended version/director's cut of watchmen was good. But I agree, could have been amazing, didnt2 live to it's full potential.
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I guess my biggest gripe with them is that they play it too safe and are too homogeneous because each film is trying to fit into a larger cinematic universe so there's nothing unique or interesting done with them. It's the cinematic equivalent of daytime soap operas you tune into every six months or a year to see the avengers fight the new big bad. Actually it kind of reminds me more of japanese toku shows with their monster of the week that the power rangers have to figure out how to defeat.
toku shows are fun though, they have some wild designs and half-decent fight choreography
Yeah if given the option I'd watch toku instead too.
No because those have a new monster every week. Slow one episode of them down massively by adding in really long fight scenes and lots of quips and you have a superhero movie
I don't that is the problem. Superhero comics take place in connected universes as well but they do it better
It's a bit like cooking soup or driving you have to pay attention but nothing ever happens so I get sleepy
they don’t make any sense at all
American cities getting destroyed by some alien sky beam makes a lot of sense if you view it as a form of displacement fiction.
My friends are all obsessed with them and I
just
don't
care
And it has been fucking exhausting hanging out with them recently because watching vapid capeshit is all they want to doI still like them. Honestly, being aware of how they're just propaganda has made me enjoy them even more. I like pointing out the dumb trends and enjoying them anyway.
The opening scene of that new Falcon show has the hero being celebrated for working with the US military to prevent some people in helicopters from reaching libyan airspace by blowing them up. Then there's a therapy scene seemingly written by someone who has never been to therapy or even met a therapist, with a really confrontational therapist who just insults the patient. There's family drama about Falcon's sister having to sell their families boat because she can't afford to keep it and her superhero brother doesn't get paid. Its just all around very silly but I still like it
The US military going all out to respect Libya's airspace is pretty funny, there's a few of those moments in Falcon & Winter Soldier like that which will immediately pull you out of it
Then there’s a therapy scene seemingly written by someone who has never been to therapy or even met a therapist
how so?
with a really confrontational therapist who just insults the patient.
believable enough...
The big Bad's seems like anarchists, which won't be presented accurately or fairly, but I hope they can get some badass moments
Plenty of good reasons why they're bad, but honestly I just find them boring af. Especially the third act when you get a 45 minute fight scene that's basically the same across all MCU movies. I got so bored in the last couple MCU movies I literally just pulled out my phone and stopped paying attention.
They outsource the fight stuff to an effects studio almost entirely because it's so cgi heavy that most normal directors don't know the technical aspects of incorporating so much CG. I remember a few directors turning down Marvel movie gigs for this reason.
Got dragged into a showing of Captain Marvel with some friends a while back. First (and only) Marvel movie I ever saw, and I spent the entire runtime wondering why people love this shit
Tony: maybe I shouldn't mass produce super weapons
Peter: Wow my second solo mov-
Tony: I bestow to you my google glasses™ with remote access to an orbital drone deployment satellite, don't get into too much trouble
after all why shouldn't a businessman with a history of unethical practices have the power to murder anyone with a thought
I like The Boys because the whole point of it is satire of superheroes and superhero movies
That shit could stand to be about 15x less gory though. So over the top.
mainly they need to cut like 5 episodes a season and have the plot move faster. It seems to be a thing in American tv that an entire season will cover just 1 thing happening
