Tag: mcu

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Movie Review: Dr. Strange and the Multiverse of Madness

Dr. Strange and the Multiverse of Madness (2022) is the latest MCU film out in theaters. Hotly anticipated because it was touted as the first real “Marvel horror film.” It’s directed by Sam Raimi and was overall roundly entertaining but like so many Marvel movies in Phases 2-Current, it falls apart if you think about it for longer than two seconds.

I wanted to like this more than I did. I wanted this to be cleverer than it was. I am absolutely thrilled we got some of the new characters we got and seeing some others getting pulled in. There was one of the post-credit scenes that put me over the moon. However, this was a lot like Endgame, in that it was a lot of fun scenes very lightly tied together by a kind of plot through-line sort of. Also I kept calling it Dr. Strange and the Mountains of Madness which would have been a much different sort of movie (though a fascinating one, I won’t lie).

A more spoilery review will go up on my Patreon, if you’d like to read it there. Let me know what you think in the comments – preferably with little/no spoilers!

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What If? (series)

The What If? Marvel series on Disney + has been something that has captured the imaginations of thousands of people. It’s not hard to see why, the art is astounding. The artists and animators should get all the awards for their work on it. Ordinarily, this is sort of thing that would be right up my alley. I love alternate universes and remixes – it’s part of why fanfic will never lose its hold on me. I like the thought experiments and the results from extrapolating out the what if questions.

I wanted to love this series more than I did. I really did. Some of the episodes made me chuckle, some of them made frown, and some of them I really wondered what the actual hell the writers were trying to convey initially because I was pretty sure that it wasn’t what was shown in the final project. The voice actors were brilliant – their performances were stellar.

There was only one episode however that really got me engaged – everything else was just pleasant filler – entertaining to have on in the background while doing something else. The stories relied too much on our previous connections to the characters featured and our willingness to still accept the characterizations that came out of the MCU.

Maybe Season Two will be better, maybe it won’t. This series for me is going into the great ideas but not great execution pile that a lot of MCU projects seem to be hitting. I remember the MCU stories used to be good – I wish they’d go back to that.

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Black Widow (film)

Black Widow was a movie. Choices were made. Not entirely sure I liked all of them, but still, at least we finally got the movie that’s been promised forever. We finally stopped getting jerked around by the studio. We got something we’d been asking for pretty much since her intro in Iron Man 2.

The film itself was okay. There was more than one point that the movie startled a laugh out of me. I really loved the vibe of it and getting to see more about Natasha here in the MCU. I loved seeing Alexei and Malina and Yalena and all their interactions. The science-y bits were kind of cool, if absolutely terrifying in both scope and practice. Ray Winstone, the bad guy was a snooze-fest and I’m still kind of pissed about what we learned about Budapest. Rick Mason was amazing and I love the actor they cast for it and I hope we get more of him. I was also amused by Valentina’s cameo.

Here’s where I got angry. This movie was treated, in large part, as an afterthought. It should have had a bigger emotional impact and it didn’t. Like it made me laugh a little, but other than that, it fell flat. . The major reason it fell flat was because I already knew what was going to happen to Natasha ultimately and just having that knowledge, robbed this movie of a lot of its strength and emotional impact. We should have gotten this movie before Infinity War at best and definitely before Endgame. It would have had a much bigger impact on the fans. Because they didn’t, we got cheated out of what would have been a much superior experience. We got cheated out of any kind of sequels with Natasha in them.

That makes me angry. I was already furious about Natasha’s end in Endgame and seeing this movie just made that anger worse. I didn’t think it was possible for me to get more livid at Endgame. Then I watched Black Widow and discovered there were still depths to descend in the anger escalator of Endgame feels.

So yeah, it was A Movie. Choices were made. I just wish that those choices hadn’t been at the expense of the legions of Natasha fans or the character herself.

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Movie Moments: CA:TFW “I’m From Fresno.”

So I love the Howling Commandos. This is not news to anyone who knows me in real life. While I have some issues with the MCU versions of them, they got them more right than wrong. I fistpumped in the theater (we were sitting in the last row) when I saw the bowler hat and I knew, I knew that it was Dum Dum Dugan. Then we got this moment and it thrilled me and punched me in the feels all at the same time.

It’s the moment, the blink and you’ll miss it moment, between Dum Dum and Jim Morita in the Hydra prison.

“We taking everybody?”

“I’m from Fresno, ace.”

This is so small but so very significant.

Jim Morita is a Japanese-American soldier.

If MCU world is tracking along the same grooves as our present world does and there’s no reason to think that it didn’t, this is what Jim Morita had to deal with prior to winding up in that Hydra prison.

Pearl Harbor happens on December 7th, 1941. The empire of Japan attacks the US and it’s bad. For a number of reasons, Pearl Harbor was one of the most horrific attacks on the US itself. Since he was considered elite enough to be considered for Steve’s squad, Morita is likely already a soldier.

December 8th 1941, the US declares war on the empire of Japan and as a side effect of this, all Japanese American men are disqualified from the draft (via the label of “4-C” or “Enemy Alien”) and any currently serving were removed from duty.

Then it gets worse. In February of 1942, President Roosevelt signed Executive Order 9066. This order gave the secretary of war to prescribe certain areas as military/exclusion zones, which cleared the way for the incarceration of Japanese Americans (and German Americans, and Italian Americans) in U.S. concentration camps.

Homes got searched for “contraband” by the FBI which took several forms including letters to or from people in Japan. All of it was seized. Community leaders including priests were rounded up and sent to camps in addition to people who were being deported to Japan for not passing a loyalty test. 122,000 Japanese-Americans were essentially told to sell their homes, businesses, and whatever else they could since they could only take what they could carry with them out of the exclusion zones. They were sent to concentration camps around the US on cattle trains (sound familiar?).

Since Jim was from Fresno, he would have wound up at Sunny Poston, Arizona. Conveniently built on an Indian reservation because the American government was terrible and why only persecute one minority when you could have a sort of two-fer?

Shortly after arriving at the camp, everyone had to answer this survey, simple stuff really, name, date of birth, hometown…and then you get to questions 27 and 28.

  1. Are you willing to serve in the armed forces of the United States on combat duty, wherever ordered? 28. Will you swear unqualified allegiance to the United States of America and faithfully defend the United States from any and all attacks by foreign and domestic forces, and forswear any form of allegiance or disobedience to the Japanese Emperor, or any other foreign government, power, or organization?

So okay, you answered yes to both? Congrats, you are now a member of the US army. If you answered no…hope you like prison and/or deportation.

All of this happens, yeah? All of this goes on.

Morita goes back to serve.

Gets captured, then rescued.

And Dum Dum says, “What, we taking everybody?”

Fork you, dude. I’m from Fresno.

References:

http://encyclopedia.densho.org/Questions_27_and_28/

https://encyclopedia.densho.org/Loyalty_questionnaire/

https://www.archives.gov/global-pages/larger-image.html?i=/historical-docs/doc-content/images/japanese-relocation-order-l.jpg&c=/historical-docs/doc-content/images/japanese-relocation-order.caption.html

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Executive_Order_9066

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