I was shocked at how reactionary that Michael Bay COVID movie looks when I saw the trailer. Obviously he’s not a master of subtlety or a director whose movies have a particularly progressive message, but “leaving COVID quarantine gets you shot on sight by the government” is fucking bananas, well-to-the-right-of-Fox-New…

There’s certainly some historical mixing up going on, as, for instance, the Vikings who permanently settled in England and made alliances with local groups were by and large not the same groups of Vikings who were raiding coastal monasteries, slaughtering anyone who opposed them, and sailing away with their riches. As…

Yep. I thought the shows were also pretty unrelentingly dour. You don’t have to have Spider-Man style quipping for characters that it doesn’t make sense for, but as Sam pointed out above Mark Waid was able to write a long Daredevil run that grapples with what it means for Matt Murdock to struggle with severe,…

I thought that, with the glaring exception of Iron Fist, all of the Netflix Marvel shows were very well cast but unfortunately the writing ranged, with the exception of S1 of Jessica Jones, from so-so to absolute garbage. I’m not dying to see any of these shows return but I would definitely watch if Disney wanted to…

After getting through another 6 episodes of the season I definitely agree that this season they’re portraying Charles in a less sympathetic light. Which is what I wanted, so I’m happy with how they’ve handled it! 

I have no intention of watching this movie because I have not heard a single good thing about it, but it’s a real bummer that they couldn’t figure out how to make this work. Between the live-action superhero boom in film and TV and the not-too-long-ago YA boom, a good and popular New Mutants movie or TV show should be…

I agree that it would be nice to have a bit more complexity in how they portray Charles. I get that the point of this show is to humanize a family who might as well be space aliens as far as most people are concerned, but by all accounts Charles is genuinely an arrogant, self-absorbed twit with a nasty streak that was…

I was a bit baffled by the choice to have the scene of Dickie’s funeral intercut with scenes of peaceful protect in Ireland against the backdrop of the IRA’s claim of responsibility for Dickie’s murder. Was it meant to demonstrate that Irish Catholics could have legitimate issues with Protestant rule in Northern…

I finally got around to watching The Clone Wars on Disney+ in the early days of quarantine this year and it made me even sadder about how bad the prequels are. Because when you see these characters and their world in the hands of competent creators you realize that the bones of the story George Lucas was trying to…

Season 2 was such an upgrade. I feel like if you’re going to do “let’s apply real world logic to goofy-ass superhero fiction” more often than not you end up with warmed over Watchmen takes (see most live action non-MCU/non-CW superhero fiction of the last decade). While Umbrella Academy skated dangerously close to…

Hmm. Lucious Hunks may have at one time been appropriate descriptors for both of them but nowadays John Stamos has aged like a fine wine, while Scott Baio has aged like a guy who has been underemployed and extremely Mad on the Internet for past 20 years.

Awesome, I did not know this was coming! For the longest time I just hoped that Allie Brosh was doing okay wherever she was because it had been so long since a new Hyperbole and a Half strip had been published and she had been so open about struggling with depression. Anyway, I’m glad she’s back. 

I think it’s always difficult to disentangle when pop culture is a reflection of the American psyche and when it’s an influencer of it. The causality is obviously at least somewhat bidirectional and simultaneous, though I’d argue that it changes over time.

Geoff Johns is a bad writer, and giving him the amount of creative control he’s had at DC for the last decade has been a disaster. He is obsessed with trying to make things just like they were when he was a kid (Barry Allen as the main Flash, Superman being a mix of his pre-Crisis depiction and the Donner movies, the…

Isn’t an adaptation of Rashomon that keeps the central conceit but otherwise is its own thing what literally dozens (if not hundreds) of TV shows and movies have done in the last 50 years? I don’t see how this is novel or interesting. 

I’m pulling for Watchmen to get a lot of recognition - it was one of the best works of live action superhero fiction I’ve ever seen, a technical masterpiece, and all the more impressive because very other attempt to adapt or build on the original comic book series has been a disaster.

That header image is absolutely cursed and I have not been able to get it out of my head in the days since I first read this article. Why does the guy lying on the couch look like he’s having a stroke?

Here’s my hot take from seeing these kinds of lists on twitter and circle-jerk NYC blogs for the past decade (and yes, I understand that they’re mostly tongue in cheek): loudly sharing your negative opinion of Kerouac, Palahniuk, Rand, Bukowski, Hemingway, Infinite Jest, etc. etc. etc. is much more grating at this…

I’m cautiously optimistic. On the one hand, I’m tired of grim, overly serious takes on Batman (you can do genuinely great takes on Batman that use bright colors and don’t feature so much angst and self-loathing, he’s a very adaptable character!) but on the other hand this at first glance looks like a pretty…

Stuff like this is why I’ve almost completely drifted away from monthly superhero comics. I pay close enough attention that when something really great like Tom King’s Mister Miracle or Jonathan Hickman’s X-Men comes out I can pick it up, but on a month-to-month basis so much of what DC and Marvel publish feels like…