Sunday!
Friday was a half-day for me (WOO-HOO!) so Maribou and I went off to see the latest event in The Superhero Apocalypse and, this month, it’s Ant-Man.
Short review: Summer movie, buy popcorn and a slushie, charming, couple of belly laughs, forgettable. You won’t mind having spent the 10 bucks, but you’ll have forgotten everything about the movie except for a vague feeling of goodwill by the time you walk out to your car.
Unless you watched it thinking “I’m going to have to write a post about this”.
The Marvel formula is a pretty darned good formula. You have an established universe which is your sandbox. (This gives you a handful of shortcuts that you can take… for example, if you establish that Hydra was even worse than the Nazis during WWII (no politics), you can just point out that this person is on this side and that person is on Hydra’s side and, tah-dah, we have established, in seconds, who the good guy is and who the bad guy is.) While in this sandbox, you take a normal…ish… guy and demonstrate that, when given a moral decision to make, he’ll make something approaching the right one. (Or, if he falters, show that his moral compass is strong enough that he’ll make the right one eventually.) Then, after the moral compass of the guy is established, give him superpowers of some kind.
Maybe they can be technology. Maybe they can be pharmaceutical. Maybe they can be mystical in origin.
The important thing is to establish that this guy is a guy who can be trusted with these powers and then, once we’ve established that, put a bad guy in play and have the good guy defeat the bad guy. Nothing too heavy, though. This is a family movie.
Oh, and give Stan Lee a cute cameo.
As for Ant-Man, we follow the formula pretty well. We’ve got a guy who is just getting out of prison for a crime that, sure, he committed, but it was a *GOOD* crime. A populist crime. In a real system, they’d give him a medal. In this one, they gave him a prison cell. After he gets out, he finds that he can’t get a real job due to prejudice against the previously imprisoned (even if those in power *APPRECIATE* the crime he committed to get there!), and he turns back into a life of crime… except he has been set up to steal Henry Pym’s Ant-Man suit. After some false starts and then some montages, we go against the established criminal, and win.
Along the way, there’s some cute family stuff, some heavy…ish… family stuff, some cute associates, some lovely special effects, and, at one point, there’s a throwback to a pretty popular album that came out in the late 80’s that will have most of us old people laughing. (Indeed, if I wasn’t in “I have to write about this” mode, that album moment would be the only thing I remembered about the movie.)
At the end of the credits, I looked to see if they had the “no animals were harmed in the creation of this movie” disclaimer or whether they had a “no mammals were harmed” and, yep, “no animals were harmed”. So if you’re worried about ants, you shouldn’t be.
Anyway, even if you hate super-hero movies (and who doesn’t?), you’ll find yourself not minding overly much that the kids dragged you to this one. It’s charming, good-natured, and perfectly forgettable.
So… what are you reading and/or watching?
(Photo is “Movie Night“, taken by Ginny, used under a creative commons license.)
The honest trailer for Marvel movies:
http://www.slate.com/blogs/browbeat/2015/07/08/the_honest_trailer_for_iron_man_shows_just_how_refined_the_marvel_movie.html
Another person on the net once said that Marvel perfected the art of “Okay compentness” or something like that.
I am currently reading Fracture: Life and Culture in the West, 1918-1938 by Philip Blom.Report
A post that links to a post that has a video that doesn’t start. I used to love the internet.
Report
I finished Wayward Pines. It remained unrepentantly stupid.
Started Humans. Only one episode in, but it seems promising.
Missed Hannibal last night (began the Red Dragon arc) so I will watch that tonight, along with True Detective, which is really making some people mad this season, but to me is not all that different once you accept that season 1 turned out to be pulpier and trashier than people initially thought it was; it was probably largely the performers and the director that helped mask that for a while. I’m OK with some pulp trash though, so it’s fine.
Reading Jeff Smith’s graphic epic Bone for my first time, along with/to my son, a chapter or two a night. I bought the color editions around the time he was born, and put them on the shelf for when we judged they might not be too scary for him. He’s six now, and neck-deep in every facet of the Star Wars universe, so I think it’s OK.
The thumbnail of “Old Disney cartoons, meets Lord of the Rings” seems pretty accurate so far (still in the first volume). Smith’s a heck of an artist and joke-writer, and my son is consistently both laughing and anxious to see what happens next.Report
Oh, Bone.
That is a great little story.
Watch out. It’s kind of like Harry Potter insofar as it starts out as pretty much a kid’s story and ends up addressing themes that are a lot deeper than you’d think a story with cow races would have in them.Report
Well, I managed to avoid Pottermania completely, so…
I’ve been tempted a few times to read Bone, both long before he was born, and ESPECIALLY once they were sitting on the shelf. But I thought it’d be fun to experience the story at the same time as him, for once. I went with the colored individual volumes over the original B&W, since I thought he might like that better; plus I think the individual volumes are easier for small hands to pick up than the phonebook omnibus edition (also, the art is probably larger? And larger text isn’t awful for me at this point, sad to say.)
I read RASL a couple years ago, but didn’t love the story (though the art was great).Report
Halfway through Political Order and Political Decay. You don’t need to have read The Origins of Political Order to follow along, though it certainly doesn’t hurt to have done so.
Downloaded the sample chapter of TNC’s new book: Very short selection, but it fulfilled expectations. Thought about downloading the whole thing, and writing it up. Would be fun to spend a week being subtly and not so subtly called a racist. Could double the pleasure by finally reading and co-critiquing Nicholas Wade’s attempt last year to revive scientific racism. Am wondering if there are any other notable recent works on race matters that would help complete the picture.Report
Picked up a book that I put down 50+ pages into 7 years ago (I tend to do this a lot…) Jack O’connell’s The Resurectionist. Its the 5th of his Quinsigimond novels, and just as weird as the rest of them. He has a fascinating way of blending hard core literary theory (semiotics and deconstructural/post-structural variety) with crime novels at the James Elroy level. For example, if he is going to have a drug induced crime wave hit his streets, the drug will be called Lingo, and it will affect the language centers of the brain. And the criminal mastermind will go by the name The Paraclete. Good times.Report
“the drug will be called Lingo, and it will affect the language centers of the brain”
This sounds like some cross between Snow Crash and A Scanner Darkly.Report
I’m still plowing my way thru a second read of Book of the New Sun. Still as bizarre as ever, in fact so bizarre that my persistence derives more, at this point, from an appreciation of the great writing than figuring out the mysteries laying behind the plot. Also spent quite a bit of time researching the latest news (well, 6 years old by now) on Everett Ruess, a “vagabond for beauty” who, as a 17-20 year old, tramped thru the Desert Southwest back in the 30s and disappeared under mysterious circumstances. The Myth of Everett and his complied letters/biographies were a pretty big part of my younger life. Revisiting it was bit like meeting my earlier self and discovering that yes, I actually was consumed by those (indexical!) thoughts and feelings once upon a time.Report
I finished Go Set a Watchman and thought it was fantastic. It connected with me in a way that Mockingbird didn’t. Which isn’t a knock on Mockingbird, but one appealed much more to my sensibilities than the other.
On John Sandford now (Secret Prey). Listening to crime stories in Alaska that take place in Minneapolis seemed like a good idea (and was) the same way I put on James Lee Burke whenever I go back South.
On TV, we have cable at the hotel and there’s been a lot of Spongebob Squarepants. Which is actually not bad at all. The quality drop-off between Nick Jr and Nick is truly remarkable.Report
I’m still dithering about reading GSaW. The argument that it was only published because Harper Lee is too ill to prevent that any more is pretty convincing. That is, the story that it has been “lost”, as opposed to Lee knowing exactly where it was and wanting it to stay there, is pretty unconvincing.Report
I am in the odd position of leaving towards manipulation but being selfishly glad she was (probably) so manipulated.
I should add that a lot of how it grabs at me related to my background, so I don’t know how many people here it would similarly grab.Report
My daughter and I just saw Ant-Man, and Jaybird left me nothing to say.
Well, except for this: the last one I saw was Guardians of the Galaxy. Is superheroes being, other than their immense powers, pretty darned goofy now a Thing? (And also this: was it a coincidence how much they made Michael Douglas’s daughter look like Catherine Zeta-Jones?)Report
Spider Man was always charmingly goofy whether he was in his Peter Parker or Spider Man persona. He appealed to a lot of nerds because he represented an idealized nerd, smart, charmingly eccentric, but also conventionally good looking. The main audience for superhero movies are still nerds so a lot of superheroes are starting to act like Spider Man.Report
The original Ant-Man (Hank Pym) was something of a raging asshole, IIRC, so the next Ant-Man had to be more laid back because of balance or some thing like that.Report
Scott Lang was the one who could bring balance to the formicidae.Report
So, I’ve just today discovered that Nick has not one, but two sitcoms about superheroes. That’s just insane.
What’s sadder still is that the concept (a show about superheroes mostly in their down time) still hasn’t been done right in any of the three shows I’ve seen. The Nick shows are too tongue-in-cheek. No Heroics was too built around potty humor.
I still haven’t seen My Hero yet, though. Maybe that one hits the target.Report
When my kids were of the age to watch Nick, it had three or four sitcoms about smart kids outsmarting dumb adults in various settings. (high school, summer camp, a dude ranch, etc.) Also The Adventures of Pete and Pete, which is the most brilliantly surreal show I’ve ever seen on any network. Neither Pete stayed in show biz, but I can’t see Rick Gomez without thinking “That’s Endless Mike!” (Michelle Trachtenberg was also a recurring character when she was tiny. Her dad was played by Iggy Pop.)Report
Smart like Malcolm in the Middle or Zack Morris?Report
The latter, I’m guessing from the Wikipedia description; I’ve never seen Saved By the Bell. Not intellectually genius-level but socially helpless like Malcolm. Ever see Jason Bateman in It’s Your Move? Like that.Report
Pete and Pete is a GOOD show. (even if they did have that character that was so creepy the actor ran away from the show and did Carnivale instead, and was less creepy there!).Report
Finished Naomi Novik’s Uprooted.
I quite enjoyed it. Nice, easy read, kind of Potter-esque (is that the new Fantasy standard now?) in that the heroine starts out a peasant girl (woodcutters daughter) & winds up a Witch. Very Slavic flavor to it all, complete with Baba Yaga references. Includes themes of friendship, love, finding one’s own way/coming of age, etc.
I think the thing that struck me most was the magic in the book (it is about Witches & Wizards, after all). The author doesn’t dive into it all in detail, but you get the feeling she has it all mapped out in her head. The fun thing is how for most magic-users, magic is very much like a science, orderly & structured. For the protagonist, it isn’t. There is still a structure to it, but it is far more organic (and less flashy), difficult to quantify, and something the heroine has to explore on her own to a degree because none of the other Wizards have much feel for how she makes it work.
Also, the truth of the antagonist is well done, and as with any good villain, sympathetic to a degree.
Anyway, fun bit of stand-alone fantasy.Report
The Wire is the first show that a video gamer’s knowledge of Greek has actually made something more comprehensible…
Also, Pittsburgh may be a sleepy, nice sort of town, but some of our suburbs look a LOT WORSE than West Baltimore… (Baltimore scores money to fix things… podunk suburb of pittsburgh hasn’t had money since the 70’s or so…)
I’d repeat a joke here, but this place is entirely too PC for it, and I’d screw up the timing anyway.Report