I will always love her for this. Not just that she did it—everyone does it on these movies. Ewan McGregor took something like a dozen takes to stop making the “VZZRR, VZZRR” noises in his lightsaber fights. But Laura actually got away with it in a take that made it to film. She’s living the dream of actually playing,…

I almost feel like you could do 25 of these on ‘Jaws’ alone. There are so many wonderfully staged scenes that the entire movie is propelled from one sequence to the next—the shark attack where the kid is taken, ending with that forlorn and anguished shot of the little raft bumping up against the shore, the 4th of July…

My partner made an appointment for a piercing three months from now, on our second anniversary. She told me that we can cancel it if I can find an effective chastity device that doesn’t require a piercing.

Well, ‘Iron Man’ steered into the skid with Stane—he’s not supposed to look like the villain until the third act, so putting Manny DaRin as Tony Stark’s bestest buddy and business adviser would have been more of a problem than a solution. But my point is more that Stane and Killmonger and the Winter Soldier might be…

Sinestro. Abin Sur is running away from Sinestro, a rogue Green Lantern who’s decided to use fear as his weapon in order to impose true order on the galaxy and not the Guardians’ weak “justice”, and Sinestro hunts him down and kills him on Earth. New GL Hal has to stop Sinestro from “pacifying” Earth with terror.

...that is so wrong I don’t even begin to know how to unpack it all. The Tesseract, before it was retconned to be an Infinity Stone in a little carrying case, was clearly based on the Cosmic Cube, which predates the Mother Boxes by about five years. They later decided to tie it in to the Infinity Stones, which in the…

Certainly any Black Panther fan did. Comic book fans tend to kind of act as a “brand ambassador” to the casual viewer, and their excitement and word-of-mouth can really make a difference in being exciting. I suspect a lot of people who saw the trailer for Black Panther who weren’t big comic book fans went to their…

Wait, wait, Egg Fu’s not also too racist?

I think there’s room for a lot of core problems in that movie. :)

The villain of the Avengers movie wasn’t the Chitauri, though. It was Loki, who was even at that point a fan favorite character in the wake of ‘Thor’ and who used the Chitauri as his soldiers and henchpeople. Hawkeye was more of a villain than they were.

I suspect so too, but you can’t save all your interesting stuff for the second movie or else you won’t get there. They needed to make Steppenwolf exciting in his own right, and that’s very hard to do because he’s not very interesting or relatable.

I’ll admit, I didn’t think of Kaecilius as the main villain so much as Dormammu, but either way, the strength of Kaecilius was his instant relatability. He lost his wife, magic gave him a chance to get her back, so he was doing ethically dubious things in pursuit of love. That’s a motivation that you can grok even if…

General Zod was a backbencher, but he was a backbencher with an easily understood hook for casual audiences. “Look, it’s a guy from Superman’s home planet, only he’s evil.” You can give his origin, rationale, and motivations in one sentence and everyone will instantly get who he is and why he’s a threat to Superman.

I agree. I think it’s a huge mistake to do it that way, because Sinestro is drawing on Parallax’s yellow fear energy and therefore the basic rules of Villain Escalation say that you put Parallax after Sinestro, but I completely agree. :)

I still feel like one of the biggest, most fundamental errors of the movie was in choosing Steppenwolf as the bad guy. Given how many iconic villains DC has, choosing one who’s a deep cut even among the sub-set of the sub-set of the sub-set of people who care about the Fourth World mythos just seems to be an obvious…

There’s going to be a speech at the end where it turns out that the true evil is a lack of ethics in gaming journalism. And then they all go off and make America great again.

I look forward to finding out how the monster in this movie is secretly millennial SJWs too.

It’s weird—when I read that, I thought of ‘Minority Report’, which has what feels like it’s going to be the climax (Tom Cruise confronts his son’s killer and the film’s morally central question of whether it’s possible to truly predetermine someone’s actions) and then goes on for something like twenty minutes as a…

Lego’s going to be in the back half of Season 1, along with Transformers, Hello Kitty, and Star Trek.

Not sure it’s wisdom per se—I think Namor was one of the properties they sold off in the 90s fire sale that hasn’t come back to them yet. Could be wrong, though.