Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 2

Here we go here we go, etc.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sD9NVxYRrZs

https://i.kinja-img.com/gawker-media/image/upload/s--lMO7rtuY--/c_scale,fl_progressive,q_80,w_800/ijbqhybaqxvblkch5sjx.png

Dammit, Ned, you beat me by 10 seconds.

You're welcome!

this was -relatively- a good superhero movie, and it was still garbage and the thought of seeing another one makes zero sense to me... definitely not clicking on that raccoon but i applaud your efforts to market this movie on marvel's behalf

good contribution

nice post, great lettering

or were you talking to ned?

Dave Bautista continues to be hilarious in this role, I see.

Why sleepingbag, I never knew that you never posted about anything you ever liked ever.

Bautista lookin' like he's preparing to star in an entirely different kind of movie, wink wink.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AefQEN3e7do

Man, Dave Bautista is so great. These movies may have the best casts of any of the Marvel joints.

i'd be cool if they just kept making these movies well after everyone stopped caring about all the other avengers MCU franchises

is that a tron character on the poster?

damn this is one super-colourful movie

also dave bautista is a born scene-stealer

I was worried that this would actually overplay itself in about a half-dozen different ways, but this is actually great - the excellent cast is only improved by more time for Michael Rooker.

Nice. Can't wait for next Thursday.

there's a lot of deft character work in here - everyone gets a little arc of their own and it's all pretty satisfying, even *sob gasp* touching at times

the way the central conflict sneaks up is clever - i spent a while not quite certain of when the villain would show up and from where

**rockets magically eject from ankles and propel me skyward as Looking Glass' "Brandy" plays**

― ╲╱\/╲/\╱╲╱\/\ (gr8080), Wednesday, 3 September 2014 21:26 (two years ago) Permalink

thought this was mostly bad tbh. Everything grating about the first film x10 (and I really liked the first film in general)

Nah, it was totally great start to stop (and beyond). Too many good moments to count, and it all looked beautiful to boot. Rooker and Bautista FTW but the whole ensemble was pretty sharp.

(Plus eight million perfectly timed easter eggs, cameos, etc.)

I'm seeing this on Sunday morning and I can't WAIT :D

i am so going to see this so hard.

probably tonight. my olde tyme theater has it in two rooms. which is nice.

i should probably call over there and ask which is the bigger screen...

Perhaps even more than the first, it is the ultimate VegGrrl movie.

:D :D

There are a couple of moments I'm thinking of where you will completely lose your shit. They're that perfectly done.

can I watch this movie from inside a bag of doritos

Haha, noticed this just now from IMDB -- clearly Gunn's parents:

Jim Gunn Sr. ...
Weird Old Man

Leota Gunn ...
Weird Old Man's Mistress

Also a number of Farscape nerds have been happy to note Ben Browder's in the film. (As is Rob Zombie.)

Nice interview with Gunn on music:

http://www.latimes.com/entertainment/movies/la-et-mn-guardians-of-the-galaxy-2-james-gunn-soundtrack-20170504-story.html

Clearing the use for such classic chart-toppers can sometimes prove an onerous process. Gunn feared that securing the rights to “The Chain” could be particularly difficult, with each member of the famously contentious Fleetwood Mac needing to sign off on its use.

I am imagining Gunn desperately trying to get a hold of each of them and dealing with each of their individual manias.

i find the music clearance stuff really interesting

If you didn't like this you're wrong

Gunn's brother becomes worthy of his SAG card with the pretty hat line

"One's BLUE."

All the Mantis / Drax stuff.
All the family stuff.

What struck me, especially hanging around for the several mid-credits scenes and the post-credits one, is how much collective creativity movies like this represent. Shit on the DisneyMarvel machine all you want, there are thousands of little touches in here that come from hundreds of people and you can tell. It doesn't feel like an auteur piece, but at the same time it's very close to Wes Anderson In Space, in a good way.

"it's very close to Wes Anderson In Space..."

you can't scare us out of seeing this movie.

It's very close to Wes Anderson in Space if Wes Anderson was any good.

If you don't like Fantastic Mr. Fox you're also wrong.

I knew when I wrote that sentence I was going to immediately catch shit from the ILX

We are cruel that way.

I do love that Gunn's big change this time around was essentially to up the Rooker content.

Good

In every way, literally.

I get the idea you liked this movie, tombot.

All the Mantis / Drax stuff.

These two were really funny. That was the best stuff in the movie.

https://i.kinja-img.com/gawker-media/image/upload/s--dK83bKv6--/c_scale,fl_progressive,q_80,w_800/h4zt6xbwcyuzjag7swam.jpg

my "in every way" was to Ned's remark about "up the Rooker content"

but they also upped everyone else - the first movie was about Star Lord, this one is really about everybody else.

Very true. And it was nice how it wasn't just redoing plot beats from the first but expanding on a lot of specific points/arcs from it instead.

Nice hyperbreakdown of a lot of the Easter eggs. Spoilers, obv.

http://screenrant.com/guardians-galaxy-2-easter-eggs/

http://i.imgur.com/aSXzjWf.png

cyberhyberhyper

This was perfectly fun. A little smug and full of itself, but that's always preferable to overly serious. It did lean hard on one of the hoariest sci-fi tropes, though, the paradise planet with a dark secret, but that was fine, too. Loved the gold people.

Incidentally, pretty high violent body count for such a light film. That goes for all the Marvel movies, of course, but those are more generic bang, fall down deaths, or explosions. This one features huge numbers of dudes being sadistically slaughtered, for giggles.

I do like the high concept nature of all these comic book movies in that they parallel the creative diversity of the original medium. That is, the characters are the same, but the inkers, artists, writers, etc., are different. You could read, say, Thor at several different times and each issue or run could be totally different from the last, for better or for worse. Or Spider-man. Or any of the titles, really. My daughter said after this was over, "there could be a hundred Guardians of the Galaxy movies, and they'd all be the same and they'd all be good." She's right. And if (when?) that happens, these first two or three would be considered "the James Gunn run" or whatever.

If there's been a failing of this Marvel cinematic run it's that the movies have been a little *too* consistent, but so it goes.

I loved the end credits, not just the goofy breaking the fourth wall dancing around (anyone else notice Jeff Goldblum popping up dancing in the credits? Or was the Sly?) but playing find the "I Am Groot" tags, which my audience at least got a kick out of more than all the post credits scenes.

I wasn't thrilled with the scene of the mutineers being slaughtered. My reactions to movie violence are not consistent, but that one left me a bit depressed. I don't like the arrow weapon.

Agree that the high body count felt gratuitous. At least with the space battles they tried to avoid mass killings by having the bad guys use remote-controlled drone ships, but that one particular scene with the massive onscreen slaughter of living beings was too much. They tried to sorta justify it in that the slaughter was both necessary (so the good guys could escape) and a righteous revenge (because the bad guys had tortured the good guys and killed a bunch of their companions), but the scene went on too long and there was way too much loving detail put into showing all those deaths.

I think that scene exemplifies the biggest problem with this movie, which is that it tends to exaggarate and overdo the elements that made the first GotG movie so great. The previous movie had one character killing 10 others in a cool way? This time he kills 200! Vol. 1 had Rocket Raccoon improvise on technology to defeat some bad guys? This time he does the same to a whole army of them! Vol. 1 had some key scenes soundtracked by soft rock and soul hits from the '70/'80s that Star-Lord likes? This time the whole team likes them, they're played all the time, and the songs and their lyrics are even commented onscreen! Vol. 1 had some of the tense action and drama broken by inappropriately humourous comments, mostly by Rocket and Drax? This time that happens in pretty much every dramatic scene!

But the biggest problem IMO, is that this movie kinda overdid main it's emotional/psychological theme, which was pretty much the same one as in the first movie. In Vol. 1, you had these losers and broken people, who had all lost their families in one way or another (if they even had one to begin with), come together as a family of choice. And that was actually the way they defeated the bad guy: by holding each others' hands so they could handle the power of the Infinity Stone! It was the obvious theme of the movie, but they didn't need to spell it out so loudly, it came across with the characters' actions and choices.

But Vol. 2 deals with dysfunctional and/or broken family relations in way more overt way. The theme is even stated in dialogue by Drax, when Nebula asks him what sort of friends the Guardians are, and Drax says they're not friends but family. And that's okay, I don't think it's necessarily a flaw if a movie makes it obvious what its central theme is, it doesn't always have to be subtle. But it gets kinda tiring how every main character gets his own "family of choice" arc in the movie; this is most evident in the finale, where all of this subplots need to be tied up, so there are just too many tearjerking moments in a row (a la Return of the King).

But don't get me wrong, some of these emotional arcs actually work pretty nicely, because they feel organic and have their roots in the previous movie. IMO the ones that work include the love/hate sisterly relation between Nebula and Gamora, and the way Drax bonds with Mantis, whom he obviously sees as kind of a surrogate daughter (since he'd lost his own). Both of those actually brough tears to my eyes. But some of them feel kinda forced; for example, the bonding between Yondu and Rocket comes pretty much out of nowhere, and it seems they just added it there so Rocket could have his own arc too. So it's all a bit overdone, they would've gotten the message and the theme across without needing to apply it to every character. It's just too neat.

Btw, the way they handled Nebula's rage towards Thanos makes me suspect they're gonna use her in Avengers 3 the same way Starlin did in Infinity Gauntlet. Which I think would be cool, because in the movies they've added a Shakespearean edge to her by having her be Thanos's abused daughter bent on patricide. Whereas in the comics she was just Thanos's self-proclaimed granddaughter, who hadn't even met him before the IG plot started rolling.

It took a rather surprisingly long time for this thread to finally enter massive spoiler territory.

I empathize with the too-many-people-killed-deliberately-with-a-flying-shiv position, but it compels me to remind you that the first movie crushed thousands of xandarians with a spaceship. These are not set-to-stun movies. And quite seriously, those guys were pirates who mutinied and Yondu was going through them to get to his son. I would have punctured all of them too, probably.

also, they'd murdered all but one of yondu's crew, who are basically his family, by exposing them one-by-one to the hard vacuum of space right in front of him

the slaughter felt pretty in-character for yondu tbh

Speaking of Nebula, I thought the only bad sfx (bad as in "you can see the strings," not bad as in OTT or gross or silly) in this film was when she is delivering her monologue in close-up and you can tell her eye piece is painted on and not a prosthetic.

An argument could be made that baby groot is a little too much of a cartoon but to be clear he is totally a cartoon shut up.

(Noted that while enumerating all the "that was a hit last time so let's lay it on even thicker this time" examples, Tuomas does not mention baby Groot at all. This is because baby Groot is unassailable)

he's a cheeky, adorable baby tree who loves to dance and, occasionally, murder

i'm at peace with all of that

I think I'd rather get the arrow than be chased down and thrown off a catwalk by a screaming cartoon sapling who really hates me

that's gotta be a really embarrassing way for a battle-hardened space pirate to go

This was so dope. I welled up at Nebula reaching out her arm to embrace Gamora weakly.

Same w/ "I've never done a good thing my whole life. You gotta let me have this" from Yondu.

If this had been a DC movie it woulda been 120 minutes of pathos rather than like...15

Well yeah because they would have had to replace all of the jokes with something

There's a joek in the Wonder Woman trailer, i am sure they'll fix that in post.

i just wanna underscore again how fantastic michael rooker is in this - he's asked to do stuff that he's either not asked to do at all in most of his roles or are badly written on the occasions when he is. every moment, whether gruff or tender, feels genuine and, although they stretch out the joke of groot retrieving the wrong stuff at least a couple of beats too long, he looks awesome wearing that head-fin

If we're going full spoiler at this point, then: Hasselhoff's five second role was amazing.

also, since we're in spoiler territory now - omg adam warlock!

did everyone catch hasselhoff singing during the credits btw?

Hahaha yes

Yeah that was fun. And indeed Goldblum's character in the credits for no apparent reason.

Also I'd never thought I'd be thinking about a Zune again but here we are.

i suspect goldblum might have had a cameo which got cut? or maybe it's just an easter egg, i dunno

anyone else get a bit of a beyonder vibe from kurt russell as ego, especially the dioramas of ego in his 80s getup romancing aliens across the universe?

also they're getting really good at the cg de-ageing - there were only a couple of uncanny valley moments in the opening sequence

Secret Wars II Beyonder, sure. Also reminded me of the bad Star Trek movie with the God planet.

The violence wasn't just the arrow slaughter. Rocket slaughters that whole army, and of course, the space pirates kill all those other pirates, too. In all three cases, sadistically, which is different than space battles. The aggressors like watching the victims suffer, whether it is Rocket finding creative ways to kill in the forest, the space pirates jettisoning people into space one at a time, or Yondu piercing all those people. And yeah, it's inconsistent, since all the Marvel movies kill or at least seriously imperil hundreds, but here it's the sadism that's a new, not so welcome change.

I love to think about the crafting decisions that go into those bits, like a group of people deciding exactly how many alien make-out sculptures go into each stage of that sight gag, and artists then choosing the colors of the aliens and which poses to use.
Like I said above there's just an embarrassment of riches of that kind of stuff in this movie.

Uh, Rocket didn't kill anybody in the forest. They all literally got back up.

And you're conflating vengefulness with sadism? They can be comorbid sure but it's not like Yondu was trying to inflict maximum pain or torture those guys.

Rocket was much more sadistic with the incapacitating series of traps but that's also in character, he chuckled while hurting people in the first movie. A lot, iirc.

I wasn't saying that it was out of character or unjustified for Yondu to kill all the mutineers, like I mentioned above, the movie explained his actions fine. But I had a problem with how much much lavish detail they put into depicting every detail of the massacre. We know how efficient his arrow is, so we don't need to spend 10 minutes of literally showing how each and every space pirate on the ship gets killed by it. (Baby Groot tackling that one bully pirate was fine and cathartic tho.) It's not necessarily sadism on the character's part, but on the filmmakers', and I thought it was just too much.

The same with the scene with Rocket against the pirates in the forest, it went on too long, they could've gotten the same thing across in half the time. The movie was 2.5 hours long, it felt like they just didn't have the heart to cut any of the cool stuff they'd concocted, it was continuously on overdrive. If they'd cut it 30 minutes shorter, removed some of the gratuitous action and violence and trimmed the overt emo scenes, it could've been as good as the first one.

Rocket in the forest serves a different purpose - it's funny.

It *was* funny, even if I got the impression he killed most of them. (Why would he just incapacitate them so that they could get back up seconds later? I even wondered, man, how many space pirates could there possibly be?) Doesn't matter, it's still sadistic, even if it's totally in character. And yeah, the violent nature of characters is one thing - these movies are all innately violent - but it all felt a little mean spirited or whatever on the part of Gunn, violence for chuckles. Which was done well ironically, such as the intro out-of-focus background battle, or the two or three hundreds of virtual video game space ship battles - but felt a little weirder when it was more personal, like Rocket or Yondu or even the space pirate mutiny. None of it affected my enjoyment - this is all an ancillary discussion - but it did make me ponder the nuances of violence in these comic books movies. Something like Avengers is all serious but mostly bloodless violence. Something like Deadpool is all gory, sadistic, cartoon violence with a self-conscious wink, effectively and humorously so. Something like Logan was non-stop brutal, vicious violence. But the first was done in service of genre/mood (war movie vibe), the second entertainment, and the third in service of toll-of-violence theme, even if they both hinge on the same one-guy-takes-out-hordes motif.

Cos he knew they weren't there to kill him and why would anybody want a Ravager bounty on their head

So he was just messing with them for fun, even if they were firing machine guns back at him and, one presumes, trying to kill him?

(Totally within character, I admit!)

Rocket in the forest serves a different purpose - it's funny.

Agreed, but that scene still went on for too long. Watching them get tossed to the air for the sixth time wasn't that funny anymore. Same with the Looney Tunes facial stretching when Rocket and Yondu went through the 200 different warp points. It was funny the first time they showed it, the the movie cut to somewhere else, then they cut back to the warping ship, and they still had to show the stretching for quite a bit more. Feels like Gunn just didn't know when to stop a scene...

The same applies to the final battle inside Ego, it just went on for too long. There wasn't any need to get the drone ships involved in that battle at all, it felt like filler. Just Ego vs. the Guardians would've been enough. One of my favourite things about the first movie was how it side-stepped the expectations of how a action movie final battle should work. You had a decent-length battle inside Ronan's ship, and then they crash to Xandar, and Ronan faces them, and you're like, ok, this is the True Ultimate Boss Fight, I guess there's still 5 minutes more of action... And then they resolve it with the good guys dancing! And holding hands! I wish Gunn had show similar inventiveness with this movie's climax.

I feel like you're stretching to nitpick things in a movie you enjoyed

one thing we haven't mentioned about yondu's revenge is that it's one of the most visually striking scenes in the film - that bright red streak painting slick crimson curves all over the ship looks cool as hell, particularly the part in the pitch-black corridor where dying pirates are lit up by arrow streaks

if there's not an atari 2600-style yondu's revenge minigame on the website for this movie btw the marketing guys should be exposed to the hard vacuum of space asap

yo tuomas you're a 'cosmic marvel' guy - what did you think about those elements in this one?

I feel like you're stretching to nitpick things in a movie you enjoyed

Maybe yeah, it's just that GotG Vol. 1 was one of my favourite movies of recent years (and definitely the best of the Marvel Movies), so I had really high expectations for this one. And pretty much all of the individual aspects of a movie were fine in Vol. 2 too: good plot, good actors, good new characters and story elements, great visuals... It's just that they took certain things that worked the first movie and overdid them in the way that makes it less than the sum of it's parts. So it's kinda frustrating how this one has all the potential for greatness, but it fails in ways that could've been avoided.

yo tuomas you're a 'cosmic marvel' guy - what did you think about those elements in this one?

I liked Ego's backstory, it was suitably transcendental, and the Sovereign culture was interesting, though they could be developed a bit more. (Though presumably we'll see more of that in Vol. 3.) I was a bit disappointed that they completely ditched Knowhere and all the story potential it could've offered with the various funky aliens etc, since that was one of my favourite elements in Abnett & Lanning's GotG run. I get it that exploring the team's base of operations works better in serial media than done-in-one movies, but still... At the very least I would've expected them to do something with Cosmo after his cameo in the last movie, but he was nowhere to be seen. :( How could they resist adding a super-smart telepathic Soviet dog to the team?!

Also, I loved that it was so colourful! Since in the recent years the "muted tones mean serious business" disease has infected even sci-fi movies (like Star Wars), this was a welcome relief from that (as was the previous one). Space operas and superhero comic movies should have some bright colours, for chrissakes!

Btw, Marvel has finally finished reprinting the entire cosmic saga that began in Keith Giffen's Annihilation, continued with Annihilation Conquest, and with Abnett & Lanning's Nova and Guardians of the Galaxy ongoing series (as well as various crossovers), and culminated in The Thanos Imperative. They've all been reprinted in omnibus editions, so if you missed the whole saga the first time around, grab them now! This is pretty much the best Marvel cosmic comic since the 1970s.

Lotta orange and teal in this one.

Loved it. Tonally different than the first, but still really enjoyable.

Lost it completely with "Father & Son" - that song has made me weep uncontrollably since I was a teenager. I legit fell apart for a few minutes there

Lotta orange and teal in this one.

You're kidding, right? (Compared to a lot of other films right now, this was far more all over the place color-wise.)

Was gonna say

can't say I thought it was particularly egregious but I did read this in an interview with James Gunn

"I wanted to make the second movie have a very distinct visual look that was much different than the first movie.

"One of the first things I did was ban the use of the colour purple.

"There's purple in the movie, but there's very little purple in the movie. Because purple was by far the dominant colour in the first movie.

"This movie is more about yellow and blue and teal and orange."

Weird.

I think a lot of what Tuomas diagnoses as overdoing it is stuff that I read as exhalation, having some more fun, "it's all but guaranteed we're going to make a shitload of money so let's play around" silliness with the occasional overextension. The opening credits fight sequence is brilliant; the "got any tape" bit is about the best use of surround sound in a theater that I can readily remember. I feel like you don't get those things without also having to accept the risk of some googly-eyed space jump gags or a mildly overwrought mutineer execution sequence.

i loved the casting of Kurt Russell
mainly bc latter-day Kurt looks like an old mythological god like Zeus etc 😃

Where did he go for a while? Like, all seemed quiet on the Kurt Russell front, and then, bam, Death Proof, Bone Tomahawk, Hateful Eight, this ... And now Goldie is back in action, too.

Kurt Russell is sort of the antecedent to Bruce Willis, no? Same sort of modest origins, crossover action appeal, leading man, able to do indie stuff in addition to pay the bills crud.

A former kid star - from Wikipedia: 'In 1966, Walt Disney wrote "Kurt Russell" on a piece of paper as his final words.'

apparently they were really close!

Final words is an exaggeration. Also he wrote "Kirt Russell"

https://www.mouseplanet.com/9734/Walts_Last_Words_NOT_Kurt_Russell

"Where did he go for a while? Like, all seemed quiet on the Kurt Russell front, and then, bam, Death Proof, Bone Tomahawk, Hateful Eight, this ... And now Goldie is back in action, too."

Death Proof came out almost a decade ago... but yeah it looks like after that he kinda stopped working for a while (going from at least a movie every year to one every couple years until 2015).

The idea that in 2017 one of the summer's top-grossing movies would co-star Kurt Russell and have a small but important role for Sylvester Stallone is kinda mind-boggling.

Not sure why. Resurrecting old stars for big budget spectaculars is kind of a thing, right? Also is Kurt Russell really co-starring in this?

Pretty much yeah - he gets as much screen time as anyone who isn't Chris Pratt.

Given his charisma at some points it felt like everyone else was supporting him.

That is, he felt like the center of the whole thing - the epicenter of the planet system, as it were - with the rest of the dozen or so cast members orbiting his stationary character like satellites.

I'm not sure I follow your metaphor.

Anyway Kurt & Goldie became empty nesters not that long ago, probably decided to actually take some time to themselves. He's been working for like 60 years.

An accompaniment to the io9 Easter egg dump that Ned posted above:

http://www.hollywoodreporter.com/heat-vision/guardians-galaxy-2-end-credit-scenes-who-were-ravagers-1000653

We'll need an Adam Warlock casting thread soon imo

Must be more genetically perfect than Elizabeth Debicki

Kurt was a fantastic choice for this role. So good.

Must be more genetically perfect than Elizabeth Debicki

$146 M weekend

congrats all, here's a lollipop

This movie essentially is a lollipop.

no!!!!!

the Emily Dickinson biofilm is *almost* to $500 G btw

Must be more genetically perfect than Elizabeth Debicki

Haha I know

of fucking course a Reddit person suggested Owen Wilson, possibly without irony: https://www.reddit.com/r/marvelstudios/comments/5p7bik/dream_casting_for_adam_warlock/

And some site I've never heard of has this list which, like other neural networks, has fits of brilliance in between the complete misapprehensions of what anything means:

Alexander Skarsgård
Ewan McGregor
Charlie Hunnam
Travis Fimmel
Matthew McConaughey
Karl Urban
Matt Bomer
Rodrigo Santoro
Ryan McPartlin
Billy Crudup
Sharlto Copley
Ryan Kwanten
Stuart Townsend
Michael Shanks
Barry Pepper
Hugh Dancy
Joseph Mawle
Adrien Brody
Laurence Fox
Christian Camargo

All of this is utter garbage of course. Adam Warlock belongs to Wanda Sykes.

I think Michael Fassbender could be a good contender? He has the required Aryan good looks, and he's capable of doing the smugness and intellectual superiority that's Warlock's trademark. Though I guess they can't use him cos he's in that other Marvel franchise...

I think "required aryan good looks" is exactly the wrong way to go about casting adam warlock

this is their opportunity to make amends for casting a white englishwoman as the Ancient One

if it has to be a dude, then I vote Richard Ayoade

ansel elgort IS adam warlock

Well his origin story is that he was genetically engineered by supervillains to be an Übermensch, so I don't see why it would be a wrong choice?

oh god i just had a nightmare vision of armie hammer as adam warlock

Though in the movie he's engineered by aliens, but those aliens felt pretty fascist too, with all their talk of genetic superiority.

"genetically engineered ubermensch" looking like some ripped-but-not-roided edition of Dolph Lundgren is outdated, bad, racist, sexist and unimaginative

it's a wonderful opportunity to cast against type and they should take it as far as it can go

young Viggo would have been good, but not old Viggo

Rebel Wilson

They'll probably make him all CGI.

Ladies and gentlemen, Adam Warlock:
http://4.bp.blogspot.com/-Kj65h9M9PhY/TlQNerRBbYI/AAAAAAAAANc/precImo1q6E/s1600/ANDY-SERKIS-007.jpg

So nobody besides Marvel nerds - and really, Starlin Marvel nerds, a specific subset - have an attachment to any specific idea of Adam Warlock. What we do know is that whoever emerges from that cocoon is probably going to be covered in gold paint, and a version of a supreme being. Why go aryan when you can go happy buddha? I'm changing my vote to Bishamber Das.

(I'll keep the remainder of what probably comes across as performative wokeness to myself unless there's a really, really good one)

(But if they cast a tall white guy I'll be really fucking pissed)

you know it's gonna happen

It's going to be Steven Mnuchin.

OK, I'm sorry already. Let's go back to talking about the movie that exists.

Sly is such a stiff actor I can't imagine him convincingly pulling off fast, witty banter/insults, which is what this movie or this type of movie requires. (I think it was the NPR review that basically said it was literally and figuratively about a bunch of squabbling children.) Even the handful of lines Sly gets are kind of off, imo. I like him as an actor, but he's stronger when he's slower (Rocky/Creed, etc; Copland) and weaker when he's doing screwball (Demolition Man, Stop Or My Mom Will Shoot.)

Eh, it's one scene of him being a hardass military commander/dad type. Easy pickings for him.

Here's a thing. I watch a lot of movies with antiheroes and I enjoy the arc of the schmuck as much as anyone - I am that schmuck, that is my arc (I cried at the end of Bridge Of Spies, for fuck's sake (I was on an airplane so prob in the bag, but that's not the point) but when the antihero sacrifices himself, I'm usually like oh, fuck that noise, that's a horrible way to die. This movie probably has the most memorable antihero death I can think of without doing some research, and also, I'm 100% OK with shooting myself into space while I drag my kid up into orbit with me so I can save them. That is the best death. Yondu is the most committed metal space dad ever. I cried a little while I wrote this.

otm

Rooker is a deceptively strong actor

i think rooker might need a strong working relationship with directors cuz i've seen him be mediocre-to-bad in plenty of stuff, but he's good-to-great in everything he's done with james gunn

This movie probably has the most memorable antihero death I can think of without doing some research

Does Han Solo no longer qualify as anti-hero? That one had more shock value at least.

Pffft everyone in the packed theater I saw Force Awakens in knew he was going to die as soon as he and Chewie split up

Spoilers!!!

It turns out Han is Chewie's dad. Shit, spoilers, sorry!

this was a lot of fun

"cranky puppy" made me laugh really hard, as did the "practical joke"

I wish I could have been in the design meeting where someone pitched "how about 40 foot Lladro figurines"? and hear everyone else say "YES!!! How many do you want?"

awful awful awful movie

awful

So what you're saying is

(Also, you are wrong.)

shocker, deems hates fun

Maybe they should have included The Killers on the soundtrack

im not trying to upset yis but i read yr posts yes yr posts and thought this would be good also the first one was great and light and made such good use of the talents and visuals and lightness and size of universe but guuuuuuuuuuuuys cmon you know how bad this was

yeah btw some killers wouldve helped

this wasnt even worth two posts noting how bad it was so im morbsing it outta here

still lurking iow

hey we figured out how to get rid of deems who knew it was that easy

:D

i liked this a lot. i might not have liked it as much as the first one but that might just be because when i saw the first one i was so shocked and surprised that i was enjoying a marvel movie so much. i would have to go back to john carter to think of a movie that was as fun to me.

i do wish they had traveled around more. being on one planet with one foe - and yeah the golden people were foes but they seemed more like comic relief and i never thought of them as a threat - made me wish for more people/places/aliens/etc. still lots of fun though. and i did get choked up by some of the family stuff as corny as some of it was. and there was still plenty of cool stuff to look at.

sums it up more or less. It ran a little long and the body count was a little too explicitly high for my taste but generally a good time that I'd probably sit through again.

the off screen surround sound tape gag had me proper laughing.

I had myself convinced at one point that the climatic moment of the movie would be Starlord kicking his dad in the balls. And it would have worked, too.

Now I feel a tiny bit bad that I may have set darraghmac's expectations high and that contributed to his having no fun

Machiavellian bit of trolling there

i liked this. maybe not as much as the first one but it was certainly enjoyable. i've yet to be completely let down by any marvel movie TBH.

Just saw this. I think this has the longest length between setup and payoff of any movie ever. I'm talking about how the beginning sets the movie in 2014 and then it gets ignored until the ending. I was also thinking during the intro that the production crew must have been cheap because they used a Dairy Queen in the 1980 scene, which you could film with a modern DQ and it would look the same, and it turned out that yes that is the joke.

I don't get it.

I believe he's referring to the product placement at the end.
And the (exactly the) same DQ shows up later when the "seed" goes off.

wait why was the movie set in 2014?

It takes place a few months after the first one

I thought the 2014 setting was for the "recent trip to Earth" to include Zune mania. I see it was discontinued in 2012, so maybe not.

the introduction of the zune at the end of the movie made me wonder if the next movie would have a 00s soundtrack. It would be a terrible idea so probably and hopefully not.

Nah, the fact that the whole idea was he went to "Father and Son" shows that focus'll likely stay.

Fiiiinally saw this yesterday. Surprisingly hilarious at points, v. good overall. It's always so pleasantly surprising that the movie side of the MCU maintains such a shockingly-high level of consistency (looking directly at you, Iron Fist).

I felt like such a bad Marvel Zombie, wondering first 'why did they hire Stallone to play some character I don't even know?' and later 'wait, now why the hell was Ving Rhames just in this thing for five seconds?' and then I remembered the crystal dude with Stallone and I was like, 'well, shit, of course.'

Also pleasantly surprised to see the Watchers. I would've thought for sure Fox held the rights as part of the FF package.

The impending arrival of Adam Warlock better damn well mean that Pip is also on the way. Just sayin'.

this wasnt even worth two posts noting how bad it was

c'mon deems, it has that surly wisecracking raccoon whatchamajig that sounds like it grew up in Yonkers, which fact fairly shouts FUN TIMES at you, while only slightly spraying you with spittle as it does so, unless you like to sit up front, and that would be your own fault don't you see.

the body count was a little too explicitly high for my taste

― Max-Headroom-drops-a-deuce-while-shredding (Sparkle Motion), Tuesday, May 16, 2017 5:54 PM (two weeks ago)

This, mostly for Yondu's slo-mo arrow slaughter scene.

While the barrage of million-dollar rainbow space puke certainly kept my eyeballs busy, there's precious little story holding it all together. The events of the plot, of which there are a great and colorful many, exist primarily to separate the beats of various relationship arcs. I can't really fault this approach, as "getting by on charm" is the established brand, and the conclusion delivers sufficient emotional payoff to make the preceding ramble feel worthwhile. But the midsection (by which I mean the hour leading up to the last 20 minutes) felt awfully long and aimless.

As with the last one, I enjoyed it but feel like I'm missing whatever it is that makes people go nuts for the franchise.

in the MCU I still maintain the first 2 Cap movies as their best output

Re: why people are nuts for the franchise, I can't speak for others, but I dig Marvel and these are the best movies that have been made of Marvel properties, and on top of that they're all interconnected. I'm not gonna pretend that it's high art, but in terms of what it is and what it does, it's pretty much everything I could've hoped for.

agreed

It's kind of miraculous that they keep hitting that sweet spot of the Venn diagram where Marvel fans and the general public intersect. Like, they could easily go the DC route and be like, 'here's another movie about that Super Man intellectual property we own, have fun people who kind of know who that is, fuck you people with any vested interest'. I'm thrilled that these movies are crack for my nerd brain and also that I get to overhear little kids excitedly leaving the theater and looking forward to more.

old lunch massively OTM in last 2 posts.
mk2 (13) enjoyed these films way more than any other superhero film.
marvel or dc based.

I am for this.

https://io9.gizmodo.com/david-hasselhoffs-guardians-of-the-galaxy-rap-is-gettin-1796789156

...audiences who lingered for Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 2's end credits were serenaded by an obscenely funky song called Guardians Inferno, complete with a David Hasselhoff rap that successfully managed to rhyme “procyon lotor” with “good with motors.”

But the good news is you’ll get to hear it and see it all over again when Guardians of the Galaxy Vol.2 gets its home release, because James Gunn has announced that there’s an honest to god music video for the song that’ll be included on the disc. And if the poster’s anything to go by, it seems like it’s going to involve the main Guardians cast getting their funk on with Hasselhoff.

Yes, that really is Karen Gillan, Chris Pratt, Pom Klementieff, Sean Gunn, Dave Bautisa, Zoe Saldana, Michael Rooker, and presumably either Vin Diesel or Bradley Cooper dressed up as a silvery robot in the background.

https://i.kinja-img.com/gawker-media/image/upload/s--u67nwkKv--/c_scale,fl_progressive,q_80,w_800/wcksvd3lettbcsdbphtb.png

lol

I somehow doubt this will improve darraghmac's opinion of the piece

that's a pretty depressing bar you've set

Hey I'm just feeling guilty let me wallow

deems otm tbf

Tombot otm

Sic otm

Hey sic. Dyou remember when we bid our fond goodbyes in Dublin, I ran into a fella from home and was half talking to him half talking to you? (I may be asking for a total recall here)

This is...scarily accurate.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VlUdkRBOv64

So...rumors about this all day now?

BREAKING: JAMES GUNN has reportedly been removed as director of the GUARDIANS OF THE GALAXY franchise following old tweets that have come to light. Developing...

— Jeff Sneider (@TheInSneider) July 20, 2018

https://www.hollywoodreporter.com/heat-vision/james-gunn-exits-guardians-galaxy-vol-3-1128786

shitcanned by jack fuckin posobiec, ouch

sounds like bullshit

but deserved sacking after sequel anyway

was some load of old shit

ugh, revived the other thread without seeing this one

it is truly remarkable that people don't delete all their old tweets the moment they get any kind of success

surprising the film companies don't have policies on this stuff. acquaintance who is a political spin doctor got a promotion and was given a day off before commencing the job to delete/edit any questionable internet content that he may have posted on social media or forums

nobody knows whomst tf I am and I rarely tweet anything particularly inflammatory (and uh certainly nothing approaching what's in those Gunn tweets) and I *still* have them set to auto-delete after like three weeks

whats in the tweets

Examples are in the links above. Pretty bad “Transgressive” rape and pedophilila jokes from 10-12 when there was less of a pushback against that. He was criticizing Trump this week than people like Cernovich and his followers started looking through his past tweets.

He's an ex-Troma guy, right? That makes it *extra* wild to me that he wasn't digitally vetted.

how it got to this is inane. dude wrote Tromeo and Juliet, nobody thought of looking at any of his social media before investing hundreds of millions of dollars in him directing a family friendly franchise for Disney.

what he said

See, this is why I use my govt. name as little as possible online. Can you even imagine how my ILX posts might come back to bite me on the ass, given that I'm the current vice president of the United States? WHOOOOOOOMPS

obviously the bad faith of Jack Posobiecus is off the fucking charts but I can't really go along with everyone on left twitter who is already calling this a clear symptom of gamergate culture because one of those tweets uses the adjective "disgusting" to describe someone who is likened to a "tranny" and if a conservative cultural figure tweeted that these folks would be calling for their head.

I love the idea of mike pence writing that stephen king sex paragraph parody

I AM TOOTH pic.twitter.com/ohkYIrRGan

— Hector 🅰️ Parayuelos (@hecpara) August 22, 2018

OMG, there is a video... pic.twitter.com/oqqIv1tNaM

— Derek Slager (@derekslager) August 22, 2018

the sequel we all need

hmmmm

https://io9.gizmodo.com/james-gunn-is-going-to-dc-and-will-write-the-next-suici-1829631777

deeply mixed feelings