Go watch Ms. Marvel

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I am so tired that it is actually offensive, after being wrenched awake by a headache at 1:30 AM last night and losing several hours of what had been pleasant sleep to throbbing temples. I’ve got a doctor’s appointment in a couple of weeks– just my regular checkup– and I’m going to bring this up, because I keep getting these exact same headaches every couple of weeks, always in the middle of the night, and I don’t know what the hell the deal with them is and I want them to go away.

Anyway.

It’s Wednesday, which means it’s the day that new comics come out, and a new episode of Obi-Wan Kenobi comes out, and– most importantly– the second episode of Ms. Marvel comes out. I was surprised to note that I don’t appear to have mentioned the premiere in this space last week; needless to say it was absolutely perfect and I would literally die for Iman Vellani, whose name is not Man Villain no matter what Autocorrect wants. The premiere was wonderful and made me insanely happy; I will watch the second episode either tonight or tomorrow and am hoping for a similarly positive reaction.

And then, after that, please God let me sleep through the night. This has been a rough week.

This might actually be real

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My wife mentioned to me earlier today that Spider Man: No Way Home, or whatever it’s called, because I’m not sure that’s it, is fully available for streaming now … and I shrugged. And then I thought about the fact that Doctor Strange and the Multiverse of Madness is out next week and I have no desire to go see it, and that Thor: Love and Thunder comes out in June or July and the trailer for that didn’t do a damn thing for me either.

I know I’ve mentioned this multiple times, but it’s amazing that it seems to be actually true: I really don’t seem to care if I ever see another Marvel movie or not. Like, she could download the Spider-Man movie on her own and watch it (and she might) and I really don’t think I’d care at all.

Amazing.

FINALLY

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I have been so, so down on the Marvel Cinematic Universe lately, but there are still a couple of projects coming that I’m genuinely excited about: specifically, the Disney+ series for Moon Knight, She-Hulk, and, of course, Ms. Marvel. Kamala Khan is one of my favorite comic book characters– there are two of her on my desk– and while they appear to have made some substantial changes to her powers and her origin for what mostly seem like reasonable reasons, the core of the character seems to be there. That “I’m a superhero!” dorky running away moment at the end there? That’s Kamala Khan. I don’t mind the look, at least, of the crystalline new power set, although I do hope they find some way to make her powers intrinsic to her and not something that’s triggered by those bracelets she puts on in one shot. I don’t have a problem with making her not an Inhuman, since the Inhumans are dumb not part of the MCU yet anyway, but I don’t want her powers to be part of her costume. Make ’em sparkly, whatever; she’s gonna be tricky for TV budgets anyway. Just make them her powers and make her her and I’m on board.

(I can– and have— bitch for hours about how the movies have fucked up Superman and Batman. I really don’t have any of those moments yet for Marvel characters. Once they got Tony Stark and Captain America perfect, I knew the characters were going to be in good hands, and I’ve not seen reason to back off on that initial assessment.)

Just … please, please, please, can we get through this series without the word “multiverse”?

Looking for a fandom that doesn’t suck

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I think if I encounter one more video or Tweet of someone explaining a complicated “theory” involving either the Marvel Cinematic Universe or Star Wars, I’m going to curb-stomp my phone. Visual media in general is dead to me outside of video games; if it’s not a cooking show I can’t motivate myself to watch it any longer, and The Book of Boba Fett is terrible. I thought for an hour or so that we might be watching Eternals tonight now that it’s streaming and I can watch it without paying extra for it, but my wife has decided she’s healthy enough to make an appearance at work tomorrow (I have the day off, of course) so she doesn’t want to stay up for it.

I need a new fandom I can dig my teeth into, something that isn’t personally exhausting and whose fans aren’t spectacularly toxic.

What’s good out there? What should I be paying attention to?

#REVIEW: Shang-Chi and the Legend of the Ten Rings

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I’m going to try to write this review without whining about Avengers: Endgame, which … nope, finishing that sentence would be whining about Endgame. And I’m not doing that. This is an interesting movie; it simultaneously feels more stand-alone than a lot of the MCU’s recent product and is pretty thoroughly tied into the universe, to the point where I keep rewriting this sentence because I can’t come up with a version of it that I feel makes sense. There are a lot of characters in this movie from other MCU films, several of whom we haven’t seen in a long time, and the movie actually reaches back to the MCU’s earliest films in some ways, but the bulk of the film explores a distant enough corner of the MCU that it feels like its own thing.

We finally got around to streaming it last night; we still aren’t doing movie theaters, and it just became available to stream last Friday, when we were out of town.

(stares for ten minutes)

… holy shit, I don’t want to write this.

OK, super short version: this is a good movie. Its ties to the wider MCU only annoyed me twice, both with mentions of that other movie that seems to have completely killed my desire to invest any further emotional energy into this franchise that I used to love. Simu Liu and Awkwafina (who I think I’m not supposed to approve of, but I don’t remember why?) are both delightful, and Tony Leung and Michelle Yeoh are awesome. It takes a good twenty minutes before a white person gets a line, and it’s like four words long, and I think the guy who has the line is the only white person in the entire movie who ever speaks, which is super cool.

(If you’ve seen the movie, you might be thinking “what about that guy,” who I’m not naming because spoilers, and he’s not white. Look him up if you need to.)

(Okay, there are two cameos at the very end of the movie of other MCU people in the stingers. They count, I suppose.)

This movie does a lot of cool things, and moves in a lot of unexpected ways, to the point where my wife paused it at the halfway point and said, with more than a trace of awe in her voice, that she had not been able to predict even a single thing that had happened in the movie to that point, and that she had no idea where the hell it was going, which was a hell of a thing, especially for a superhero movie. It manages to be a very small, personal movie and have the main character save the world at the end, which doesn’t happen all that often.

And, like, okay, I just said I didn’t want to write the review and then wrote four paragraphs after the words “super short version,” but I can’t escape the feeling that no one really needs anyone else’s opinions on Marvel films anymore. Like, are there people out there who only watch some of these? People who saw, like, Iron Man 2 and Doctor Strange and Black Widow and that was it? Maybe watched the middle two episodes of Loki but otherwise haven’t dipped into the TV shows? You already know you’re going to see Shang-Chi, or you know you’re not going to; there’s no one out there who is going to be, like, “Oh, Luther liked the 30th Marvel movie, so I guess I’ll check it out too.”

I mean, I guess if you aren’t into superheroes but you like martial arts movies, this is worth a look? I don’t think I’d actually call it a martial arts movie despite the main character, but I thought the action was pretty damn well shot– the director has a good sense of space and you can always tell what’s going on and where everyone is relative to everyone else, and there aren’t any scenes where the action is dark and muddled so that it looks Cinematic, which is an absolute plague on moviedom. The movie looks really good, and everyone is very pretty, and ok maybe some of the CG is a little dodgy here and there– there are some lion-things that, frankly, look stuffed– but whatever. And I spent the entire movie wondering if I should have some idea who the character on the far right of that image up there was and never figured it out. But that’s the best I can do in terms of criticisms. The biggest problem with this movie is that it’s a Marvel movie, and the best thing about this movie is that it’s a Marvel movie, and yes those are both true at once, and I’m heading back into being tired again so I’m going to bring this to a close.

Happy Thanksgiving, by the way, and in observance of our ancient traditions, I close by presenting you with this: