nvrtrustatonystark

[nvrtrustatonystark]

You know, when I read about whats happening in the US I keep thinking. When was the last time a big shot actor, but specifically a marvel actor, spoke out against trump. Whats happened to mark ruffalo and chris evans who were so fucking loud during trumps first term. When was the last time any of them put their money where their mouth is. The only thing I can find on evans is the 30000 he fonated to a childrens cancer charity, which he won in a fantasy football league. We knew it was performative when he kept talking about social justice and then went and signed missiles in an army camp, ready to be dropped on civilians in the middle east. But where has all the virtue signaling gone now that people are being kidnapped and lives are on the line? Guess the money is flowing in the other direction now. Taylor swift has already done a 180 hanging out with trumpies all the time, which is sure a sign as any that rainbow capitalism isnt lucrative enough anymore. And now here I am wondering if I've seen ANY marvel actor talk about politics since biden took office

[nvrtrustatonystark]

According to tonky stans, Steve stopping tonky from committing murder is the worst thing EVER!!! Like how dare he disable Tonky’s weapon of mass destruction!!!! Poor tonky, Steve’s always ruining his fun when it comes to not letting him murder brainwashed Prisoner’s of war. HOW DARE HE?!?

[nvrtrustatonystark]

[nvrtrustatonystark]

The problem of course with reading anything marvel is that tony stark keeps showing up

[nvrtrustatonystark]

Captain America: Brave New World- The former Falcon flies high but the MCU is on autopilot. Edited with a lawnmower and both dramatically and politically incoherent, the movie occasionally comes alive enough to be a 30-minute TV episode, but is deathly afraid to be ABOUT anything. It's watchable enough but anyone experiencing "Marvel fatigue" or "superhero fatigue" will not find the cure for it here.

The film appears to be 50% reshoots and ADR by volume. It's the kind of movie where every line of dialogue is followed by an over-the-shoulder shot which has clearly been redubbed in post, with a voice-over by the actor, sounding a bit different, explaining exactly what's going on in the plot right now. Then we cut back to the actor in a visibly different position and mood, as if a minute of edited footage has just been cut out. It goes on like this for 118 minutes. Film producers tend to assume that audiences are too stupid to notice when this is happening in a film, but even if audiences can't name the exact problem, they certainly notice that something is wrong to this degree. The film is edited like a reality TV show, and I personally don't like being treated as if the producers think I'm a moron.

A voiceover is explaining the plot at basically all times, and it's not hard to guess what the test screening notes were that led to these voiceovers. For example, at one point Sam Wilson has to make a tough choice and abandon his soldier sidekick, Joaquin Torres, who has nearly died. About a hundred awkward voiceovers and reshoots follow, seemingly edited in at random, assuring us that this was the right choice and everything is being taken care of and the medics are on their way. Boy, it stinks. Not to a "Madame Web" degree, but very little actual acting has survived the surgery.

This mess was originally announced as "The Serpent Society" with Seth Rollins and Rosa Salazar as baddies. (The previous film Civil War was also announced under this title.) You won't see them here. Instead Giancarlo Esposito shows up as Sidewinder, leading something just called Serpent, which is not elaborated on. Esposito memorably played Gustavo Fring in Breaking Bad and Better Call Saul, and has clearly been hired here so that he can do the exact same thing without anyone asking further questions about who this guy is. That must have simplified things a bit. The film was then announced as "New World Order," which made it sound like an anti-semitic conspiracy theory. Production began in 2023 under the title "Rochelle Rochelle." Mark Ruffalo's Hulk was cast then uncast.

Anthony Mackie has a few decent scenes as Sam Wilson, now Captain America, with the subtext being that a black man without superpowers has a lot to prove. Mackie is charming enough, and so is the conceit that he is often getting injured and working through it. But anything that might be interesting about his performance is usually lost in an incoherent barrage of ADR and reshoots. Carl Lumbly is also often affecting as Isaiah Bradley, an aged super soldier jailed by the US government for decades, whose backstory is politically charged enough that the film has to make the story incoherent rather than get "political" with it, playing up the danger that Bradley might pose (even if the actor is 73).

Politics, or the lack thereof, is very clearly the problem here, as it was in the 2021 TV series The Falcon and the Winter Soldier. I've made a lot of jokes about how that series was clearly intended to be political, but was so watered down by notes and reshoots taking it in a more right-wing direction that it ends up being politically incoherent. A subplot about an unleashed virus hit too close to home and was reshot out of existence. This film is even worse, as it makes no coherent political statements at all, to the degree that there's no point in it even existing. Having a black Captain America onscreen must have resulted in a flurry of notes and complaints from any right-wing person working anywhere at Disney and Marvel. With any hint of politics removed, we're apparently supposed to think that "both sides sure are crazy, and need to work together," without any understanding of what these "sides" are, what their motivations and goals are, and what they might represent. The film has no point of view, which makes it eminently skippable.

I'm also sorry to report that most of this film's good ideas were used up in that mediocre television series, including a larger role for Sebastian Stan's Bucky Barnes, who merely has an awkward cameo here. Daniel Bruhl's Zemo is also absent, along with anyone else I might care about. Instead, Sam Wilson is running around following up on plot threads from a 2008 Hulk movie everyone else forgot about two Hulks ago. The result has about enough plot for half a trailer.

And, to be clear, this is a movie where a black Captain America has to fight the President of the United States, who is a half-dead senior citizen and a big red rage monster, who wanted to lock Sam up and gets locked up himself. The jokes about how this transfers to our current politics write themselves. In real life, American democracy has been dismantled by fascists. But this film is afraid to come up with a political take more complex than "What if there were a red guy?"

To be fair, it is an impressive red guy. An ancient Harrison Ford seems awake enough, replacing the late William Hurt as Thaddeus "Thunderbolt" Ross (Hurt died in 2022 during the movie's development). And the effects artists seem to almost be having fun recreating Harrison Ford as the Hulk. It's kind of a dumb idea but at least it's an idea. Meanwhile Tim Blake Nelson has some fun playing a villain, reprising a role from the 2008 Hulk movie with Edward Norton that we should have forgotten about by now. His role was clearly rewritten and reshot quite a bit, like everything else in this movie, as he has a handful of eccentric or clever character lines that seem completely out of place, when all the other dialogue is just flatly restating what is happening in the plot right now, as if the target audience are not watching the film. It's also unclear whether Nelson and Mackie were actually onset together during key scenes.

The film also spends a lot of time teasing the idea that Liv Tyler might also show up, because of a Hulk movie 17 years ago that hasn't been canonical since 2012. I just watched the movie and I'm still not 100% sure she actually did show up and talk to Mackie or Ford, although we hear and see something that might as well be her.

Our heroes include a bunch of interchangeable military men, which is uncomfortable and/or uninteresting. There's also Danny Ramirez as the soldier Joaquin Torres, who was in the TV series and wants to be the next Falcon. He's irritating, mainly because he's the sidekick to a sidekick to a sidekick to a sidekick, and you feel that with every line. Anthony Mackie has enough screen presence that you don't think about that. Mackie can play the lead, but Torres is just some guy.

There's also the matter of Shira Haas, playing tiny Israeli agent Ruth, based on the controversial comics character of Sabra. She's five feet tall and twentysomething, and looks about half that height and age due to childhood kidney cancer. It's not entirely clear why she's even there, although I can take a guess.

By comparison, the previous film titled "Captain America," 2016's "Civil War," introduced Black Panther and Spider-Man, two of the most popular Marvel heroes, as well as Ant-Man's Giant-Man persona, and a fight between all of the Avengers. What we get here doesn't compare. It's as if you'd booked Beyoncé Knowles for the Super Bowl, but she cancelled, and your niece who plays in the high school band was drafted as replacement.

Racism and sexism can manifest in a lot of ways. One of them is the feeling that when someone who isn't a white man is the lead on the poster, everyone else down the line is no longer bringing their A-game. Maybe the previous Captain America movie introduced Black Panther, Spider-Man and Giant-Man and had all the Avengers, but that was Steve Rogers and this is Sam Wilson. So we've got Joaquin and little Ruth and that's it. As far as I noticed, the film never calls itself "Captain America" either, onscreen. Maybe in small print somewhere at the end.

And to be very clear, this is also what the movie is about, to the extent that it's about anything. Anthony Mackie, Danny Ramirez and Carl Lumbly are very clearly acting their hearts out in a movie that's about how people of color have to work ten times harder to get any respect at all. And they're being set up to fail miserably by Marvel and Disney, as a movie studio, for that exact same reason. The movie is terrified about being about anything, but when the leads are allowed to act, it's about them risking their lives for a country that sees them as disposable, and a poor replacement for the real thing. You genuinely feel how this will probably kill them, and these scenes are genuinely good and affecting. The movie ends with one of those scenes. But the movie can't reckon with that for long, because it's doing the exact same thing. It can't care about a black Captain America too much because that's "political." We know that Steve Rogers fought Nazis, but Sam Wilson can't express anything like that because it's "political." There's no mid-credit scene because they're out of ideas, and the end credit scene has the villain kind of hinting about multiverses, something that every other Marvel project has already done while this one was delayed.

We do have Marvel fatigue right now, because after the big "finale" of Avengers: Endgame, the franchise took a more experimental approach, introducing new heroes and turning to television. Covid then delayed and confused things, and the result has been that Marvel has introduced at least seventy-five new heroes in the past few years, very few of which seem destined to do anything more at the moment. Every Marvel movie used to feel like a big event, back when they all starred blond white guys named Chris. Eventually, the most racist and sexist of the Marvel executives left, and I'm mainly talking about Ike Perlmutter here. And we started to get movies and TV series starring women and people of color. Lots of them. Almost too many of them to keep track of.

Like The Marvels, which is edited down to be one of the shortest Marvel movies, as if they're afraid audiences might turn on them at any moment. And there started to be a narrative that Marvel had lost its way, at the exact same time it started making movies and TV shows that didn't just star white blond guys called Chris. Mostly that's a narrative from idiots yelling on Youtube who don't watch the movies anyway. But sometimes you get the sense that people at Marvel agree, that they lost their way somehow and need to course correct. Not by making the movies feel special again, but by hiring Robert Downey Jr. again, and Chris Evans.

And that's Blernsball.

"A Leela of Her Own" is the 48th episode of Futurama. Leela becomes the first female Blernsball player, a confusing future replacement for baseball. She is hired as a novelty, because she's actually a terrible pitcher who "beans" the batters with a ball to the head. Rather than actually be a symbol of female progress in the male-dominated sport, she is being used as a joke to further show why it should remain segregated.

When the 82-year-old Democrat Joe Biden was considered (in the press) unfit to serve another term as President, he was hastily replaced in the campaign by his 60-year-old Vice President Kamala Harris, a woman of color. Voters were hugely excited about this possibly historic election for awhile, but as Joe Biden's staff took control of the messaging, Kamala ran to the right and largely promised not to change course from what the unpopular incumbent had done. The Democrats raised a huge amount of money for all of this, and seemed to conflate raising money with winning. That's not the same thing, and Harris did not take office as President. What I'll say next is a matter of opinion, but it seemed to become clear after the election that, behind the scenes, the Democratic staff lost interest once Biden was deemed unfit. They ran Harris to have someone to run, but many felt that they'd already lost by losing Biden, and were now going through the motions. They seemed to share none of the voter interest, in running someone new, a possibly somewhat left-leaning Dem rather than the old-fashioned and fading Biden.

Captain America: Civil War is about a fight between all the Avengers which digs up old buried secrets and divides the team in two. Black Panther and Spider-Man show up. The previous Captain America movies are considered among the best in the franchise. The Winter Soldier in particular has vivid, realistic fight scenes and balances superheroics with some of the tone of a grounded political thriller.

Brave New World, as it's titled onscreen, has the guy who used to be The Falcon doing Falcon stuff, and is about what if there was a red guy. It's watchable. It's also skippable. It's Blernsball. And I'd be curious about what kind of stuff they shot for this, but decided was too political or interesting to screen right now, as the USA falls apart during a second Trump Presidency, never to be the same again.

[nvrtrustatonystark]

rachel having a hollywood producer FLY OUT to her and ask her to take down her tweet and she still refuses? love her moral backbone. genuinely. [x] [x]

[nvrtrustatonystark]

Ok i made this post in 2019 though he’s gotten significantly worse since then.

Ok but like imagine civil war from peters perspective, youre 14, post some vids of yourself doing some sick flips, a few months later Elon musk shows up and your house and coerces you into flying to another country to pick a physical fight with his coworkers

[nvrtrustatonystark]

MARVEL RIVALS TEAM GOT LAID OFF HOLY SHIT CAPITALISM IS SUCH A STAIN

[nvrtrustatonystark]

the way mcu Peter is the one existing in the least financially stable position out of the three we've had yet is the one who gets called middle class and an insult to Spider-Man's origins the most is baffling to me

yes, he's technologically more privileged than the other Peters having been given access to the suits and connections he has, but that isn't because he's wealthy or middle class, it's because of grooming. the tech he has is a by-product of child exploitation. and that then led him to being further exploited by others afterwards. hardly a fair trade off.

(And as for Midtown High, Peter's a scholarship student and an exemplary student at that, needing scholarships and grants is literally how Tony gets his literal and proverbial foot in the door with him.)

All three live action Peters have ties to some incredibly rich men, but one has a significant and important contextual difference I've seen ignored constantly:

Raimi's Peter and TASM Peter were both childhood friends with a boy their own age in authentically and organically formed relationships, formed before either Peter acquired their powers. Both Harrys were peers to the Peters, despite the wealth gap, and the Harrys don't make the Peters feel lesser for not having the same resources or living situation. It wasn't smooth sailing and there were issues that arose due to that gap, but at their core, the Peters and the Harrys were friends without ulterior motives. This is also the case with many other versions of Peter and Harry.

MCU Peter at 14 was specifically targeted and exploited by a 46-year-old man who'd been stalking him (justify it however you like, the fact Tony had been aware of Peter as Spider-Man and did digging to find out who he was and where he lived. He'd been watching Peter for up to six months... that's a form of stalking).

He had no prior relationship with Tony outside of childhood hero worship for Iron Man. Tony Stark is one of the most powerful men on Earth, financially, socially, academically and politically speaking, as well as militaristically as Iron Man, and Peter is a child who got powers six months ago wearing swimming goggles and a hooded sweater. Already, all of this creates several power dynamics that aren't to Peter's benefit.

Tony locks him in the room with him after entering his home under false pretenses and offers him gifts/bribes him after rifling through Peter's belongings mocking and making Peter feel small for what he did have. Tony had ulterior motives for seeking Peter out that, no matter how you spin it, are child exploitation. He turned Tony down, we never see Peter willingly agree, yet Tony didn't take no for an answer and used blackmail to get him to fight for him without telling Peter anything, particularly scary since he had Peter fighting against his own human rights as a genetically enhanced person. All he told Peter was that Steve had "gone crazy" for not wanting enhanced people to... say, have to wear 24/7 identification and monitoring trackers. Wild.

And despite admiring Tony who's given him all these things, he's frequently disobeying Tony. He and Tony have contradictory ethics. Their morals are at odds, they're constantly shown disagreeing on how to handle situations because Peter is far more like Steve Rogers than he has ever been like Tony (something we also see between how Peter handles Norman, under the control of another entity to kill May, and how Tony handled Bucky, also under the control of another entity to kill Maria.)

Peter might be into tech and a genius, but that's where his likeness to Tony ends. It's people like Happy around him who try to make him fit into the box of a Tony mini-me (ex. in FFH, we're shown Peter through Happy's grieving eyes as this, and then through the use of the music and the camera frame shifting solely to Peter, we see that it's a false legacy Happy's invented in his grief. Peter has a completely disinterested reaction to the music, even though he claims to "love" it and gets the artist wrong. This isn't a reach, it's symbolism, used to convey complex themes without having to spell it out.)

It can even be argued that Peter failed to clue into Quentin Beck because Beck treated him exactly the same way Tony did, which we're shown was on purpose once Beck drops the act and we learn he personally knew Tony and how he behaved. Peter has been constantly exploited, not just by Tony but also by "Fury"/Skrull Fury and SHIELD, since the age of 14. None of Peter's peers are in the superhero/spy world and he was never given the chance to properly talk to any of Earth's other heroes, just Tony, so he has no point of reference to know what is and isn't acceptable dealings in superheroism. Every single time he's been recruited, it's been with lies and manipulation. Victims of abuse, of any kind, are 4x more likely to go through it again as they go through life and that only goes up if they were under 16 at the time of first instance.

Anyway, I'm just really tired of seeing important context about MCU Peter ignored. No one seems to realise that they're not calling out proof that MCU Peter is lazy for using this advanced tech or living in a billionaire's back pocket, they're highlighting the symptoms and direct results of child exploitation.

[nvrtrustatonystark]

Ok but like imagine civil war from peters perspective, youre 14, post some vids of yourself doing some sick flips, a few months later Elon musk shows up and your house and coerces you into flying to another country to pick a physical fight with his coworkers

[nvrtrustatonystark]

The Falcon and the Winter Soldier, TFATWS

marvel memes

[nvrtrustatonystark]

tony stark slander is all fun and great -- but it is very weird how people who justifiably shit on the MCU for military propaganda sort of ignore how the DOD lended financial support to The First Avenger and Winter Soldier.

It's funny that the iron man movies do have more of a focus on the weapons manufacturing side and that makes them easier for most people to criticize.

The military isn't bothered by the representation of traitorous evil military characters and secret nazi organizations or whatever as long as there are soldiers in it that look cool bc that is ultimately the kind of thing that makes it easier to recruit people. the kind of people who are going to be more willing to join and support the military aren't going to see themselves in the endless masses of nameless bad guys, but in the captain americas.

[nvrtrustatonystark]

My favourite little x men thing is when someone is like "Give up, Magneto! You stand no chance against this plastic weapon/gun/suit I have built!"

And Magneto is like "I see. Whatever will I do."

and throws the surrounding infrastructure at them.

[nvrtrustatonystark]

you’re doing mental gymnastics to try to justify loving that billionaire capitalist bum bruce wayne while hating tony stark oh im laughing

It's not mental gymnastics. I don't hate Tony Stark because he's rich, I hate him because he's a rude, weapons manufacturer who makes bad decisions and forces other people to follow his whims. Batman is rich, but he also is shown to have an active philanthropic side and he simply isn't annoying. It's that simple.

[nvrtrustatonystark]

People really out here acting like Captain America (the Steve Rogers I know and love) wouldn’t fully support #TakeAKnee…. like read a fucking comic book before you act like Steve Roger’s is as mindlessly patriotic as y'all.

[nvrtrustatonystark]

Been a couple months; am now back on my bullshit 😂

Don’t mind me I’m just thinking about the fact that Tony Stark KNOWINGLY hit on May Parker 6 months after her husband was murdered. Dude didn’t even have the decency to act normal before blackmailing her child