I think this is the problem for me with the Marvel films in general (and all the stuff they've influenced) in that they're not actually *about* anything. They can be entertaining moment to moment. But it doesn't add up to anything at all.

I don't mean they have to be explicitly about something outside themselves, they don't have to be commentary or allegory or whatever. I just mean that they're not even really *stories*, just a series of kinda arbitrary unconnected events and outcomes, they don't really emerge from anything.

They're kinda just character studies. But of deeply uninteresting characters.

For the MCU as a whole, actor deaths and accusations have played a part in changing the overall story arc.

Sometimes, it's just highly enjoyable to see characters you love on the big screen.  I'm a big fan of 80s and 90s Spider-Man cartoons and the 90s X-Men cartoon.  Tobey's Spider-Man, X-Men and X2 were all a wonderful experience for me.  I don't really care if they go anywhere.

We're now at the point of saturation, there's so many superhero and special powers type films and TV shows, that it's hard to find something unique to enjoy about each one.  Deadpool should be an easy hit, swearing, self-mockery and 4th wall breaks.  It still needs a good story and good writers though.

I got some free* collectible Marvel cards at the supermarket today. Now I suppose I must go see the movie.


*with >= $25 purchase

Box office receipts passed $1,000,000,000 over the last weekend. As it's still out in theatres, it will probably overtake many box office faves such as Pirates of the Caribbean, Toy Story 4 etc. Mind you, in a list which includes Aquaman and the Super Mario Bros Movie, that's a sad way to succeed.

Cinema offerings have generally been rock-bottom terrible for quite some time.

OK. I largely agree. There's an emptiness to many of the stories, and I think you're description of the problem is pretty well correct. There's too much production and too little direction. In other words, all the great ideas are show-boated because the producers think that's where the money is, And, of course, the directors follow that lead because they get hired again and applauded by a cast of millions. But the stories are left behind and if they're even completed, it's an afterthought. And the stories are empty because they're just constructed to bind all the events (great ideas) together rather than being in any sense living, breathing things.

Which, oddly, is where television series will win. It's because TV writers absolutely have to focus on stories. It's why the Loki TV series was superior to any of the movies featuring Loki, and ( I think) Marvel Agents of SHIELD was more engaging than the parallel movies.

I used to think of the 80s as when cinema went wrong. When dumb action movies became the money-makers. But, looking back, something like Predator is fucking Shakespeare compared to what we get now.

I've been listening to Chapo's Time for My Stories where they talk about a bunch of prominent TV shows from recent decades (also Gunsmoke). They have a bunch of theses as they go through. One is that entertainment became political in a weird way. We want media to reflect our politics and we see our choice of media as a political choice. And, because there's *so much* media now, it's all microtargeted so we're just kinda watching reflections of ourselves. Lady Ghostbusters was feminist because it... had women in it, and if you don't like it you're a misogynist and watching it is a political statement, whether it's good or not is beside the point and if you focus on that you hate women.

In their Game of Thrones episode (which is very good and you might enjoy) they identify GoT as being on the cusp of that change and as the last consensus reality. The last thing that everyone watched and agreed as to what it was.

I don't think that's the whole problem but I think it's in there for sure.

It definitely diverged before that (if I understood your point); LOTR spawned some nasty memes from the jingoes post 9-11.

Yeah, the point isn't that nothing was differently-understood before (though honestly in that case I'd say the jingoists were reading Tolkien *right*). It's that we've reached a point where *nothing* can be commonly understood. 

All media is now overtly part of this shitty culture war that stands in for politics.
 

I think what's changed is that a lot of people have become highly misinformed, and highly opinionated about topics they neither knew or cared about previously. Influenced. That's by design.

I think, over here at least, deregulation of the media (and, later, the internet of course) played a huge part.

We've always been misinformed, but until the 90s or so we were misinformed according to the wishes of the state. Which is not *good* but does at least lead to coherence. 

Now we're misinformed by the market and we can choose our misinformation. And as scientists and other experts bent to the whims of the market they discredited themselves, so we lost any sense of there being any reliable universal authority.

And in an environment where huge numbers of people have, for the past 40 years, been economically immiserated, socially atomised, politically disenfranchised and culturally demonised, that's a real problem when there's no left speaking to them.

It's socialism or barbarism and there's not a whiff of socialism.

Of course, there are parts of the state that are actively engaged in promoting a contradictory, atomised set of views and beliefs. In the USA (how long will the "U" remain vaguely applicable) we can see the growth of political cults towards the end of the C20th and the start of the C21st which were unusualy wacky, even in a nation where cults were and had been commonplace since the inception of the nation. So in the first decade of this century we see the rise of the Tea Party which was a powerful political force in spite of having no obviously coherent policies, not even libertarianism or alt-right conservatism. Much of this fervour has been adopted by the GOP under Trump, so we see incoherent and often contradictory pronouncements. And yet what Trump actually did in power was entirely in line with what Nixon was aiming at 50 years earlier. Pack the Supreme Court with rightwing morons, institute a kind of C17th conservative moral code by law, free the ultra-wealthy to do what they want, crush socialist dissent. Well, he managed the first of those and started on the others. 

Over here the same has been the aim of countless MPs within the Tory party and elsewhere. We had the insanity of Johnson, who lied every bit as wildly and enthusiastically as Trump and lent support to every rag-tag bunch of thugs that sounded roughly in line with Tory strategy. I think that there's an important sense in which the UK hasn't been governed for the last decade and a half. It's been shaped into a disparate mass of groups and individuals.

Thank goodness we've got that sensible, honest socialist Mr Starmer to lead us out of this mess.

> there's an important sense in which the UK hasn't been governed for the last decade and a half. It's been shaped into a disparate mass of groups and individuals.

That rings very true, yeah.

The Tea Party's sole coherent policy was rich guys not paying taxes, hiding inside a nebulous cloud of grievances the rich guys couldn't care less about, but got the great unwashed onboard with sufficient coaching. It was, and remains a resounding success, and is the meal ticket of ensuing extreme right movements.

I think the original impetus for the Tea Party was opposing the bank bailouts. Which is a good position. They held it for the wrong reasons, of course, and quickly became a vaguely racist anti-Obama, fiscal conservatism thing but ... yeah.

 

Similar confusion is visible in the Gilet Jaune thing in France. It kicked off with one main gripe. People who were obliged to depend on fuel, especially diesel, were suddenly hit with big tax rises. This came on top of a history of falling wages in rural and semi-rural occupations, rising prices, and rapid increases in inequality. The final straw, as it were, was that the tax increases were portrayed as environment-friendly measures, whereas many of the worst environmental offenders, big corporations and wealthy individuals, were getting massive tax breaks, even as their wealth increased. The poor saw themselves cast as anti-environment-friendly while being expected to contribute most. So far so coherent. Where it gets confusing is that there was no single solution or view being espoused. Gilet Jaune protestors came from the right, the far right, the left and the far left. Most were anti-Macron. Also, as the protests expanded, the root causes were muddled, in part by the government and the press with a campaign of disinformation and partly because the causes actually did begin to divide. There were plenty of protestors who cared nothing about the price of diesel, but were profoundly anti-Macron. They were joined by revolutionaries on the right and left. Probably most significantly, later, especially after the end of the Covid restrictions, it became an anti-police protest. The French police were extraordinarily violent in their response to protests (perhaps I should say openly violent, because with their history of bodies floating down the Seine in the 50s/60s/70s they have some previous m'lud) with numerous instances of lost limbs, blindings, and brain damage.

Macron is an unusually inept president. He seems to have a skill for instituting reforms in a manner most likely to upset people. No sooner had the Gilet Jaune protests dies down, than he introduced a pension reform. To say it was clumsy is an understatement. But there you have it: violent protests again.

This is slightly tangential to that but most recent mass movements seem to have this amorphous, non-specific quality. 

Even the more organised ones, from Occupy to BLM to Gilet Jaune, they don't really have *demands*. So they can be easily co-opted and neutered by the bourgeoisie, as in the case of BLM, or just ignored, as in the case of Occupy, which was crippled from the outset by its extreme horizontalism. ("defund the police" isn't specific enough to be a demand, it's a slogan).

Even the climate activist groups like Just Stop Oil and Climate Rebellion, they're a bit more organised and *kinda* have demands, but they're not very good at putting those demands at the forefront of their activities.

The recent student protests were a bit better and in some cases actually got something done.

Again, I think the lack of an actual left prevents these movements from getting much done (when they're left-aligned). A protest, in and of itself, is never going to do anything. 

The global elite have been very diligent at ensuring popular resistance to their misrule remains fragmented and confused. This is mainly by contolling the vectors of information, in olden times sermons, then books, newspapers, radio, tv, internet, and currently social media (we may reasonably suppose efforts are underway to influence brain waves, as shown in a Batman film), and by fairly transparent and brutal reward/punishment regimes. They made capitalism function as an apologia for theft and murder. I think these things are generally known and understood, but only voiced by kooks. The institutions of the left, and newer formations as they spring up, are very closely monitored, infiltrated, and disrupted. If they have coherent demands, and they often do, these are misrepresented and twisted by those who interpret things on our behalf and tell us what to think. It is an extremely challenging environment, and it seems can only be matched by some equally fanatic cult or religion. But those can also be co-opted.

I watched this the other night. Mostly out of something like morbid curiosity.

Annnnndd... for what it was *trying to be*, it was very good. If you like the character of Deadpool and the irreverent comedy and meta-commentary then it does that stuff very well.

It was fun to see Blade. I have a soft spot for Wesley Snipes. And I *reallly* enjoyed Channing Tatum's Gambit as a Louisiana weirdo, that was probably my favourite thing in the film.

It didn't make me laugh but it did make me smile a lot. But it also made me roll my eyes a lot (I'm a bit tired of Ryan Reynolds' patter).

There were bits of invention. Like the extended ultra-violent fight scene in the family car.

I surprised myself by enjoying watching it. But ultimately it was hollow and left me with nothing. These Marvel films have the feel of music videos or slick adverts rather than actual films.

I think William nailed it with: There's too much production and not enough direction.