Benedict Cumberbatch IS Doctor Strange.

nice!

it's over-referenced due to it being stuck firmly in Dr. Doom's continuity at this point, but the "Dr. Strange/Dr. Doom: Triumph & Torment" book (with art by Mike Mignola!) is pretty cool

paul smith sounds like a good fit for strange. i never saw those back in the day.

so is this cool and trippy?

trippy as in outer space and crazy colors, not trippy as in Inception/Matrix CGI buildings

I regret getting rid of a bunch of those Paul Smith issues that I got in the 80s, those were v good. Is the Michael Golden one referenced upthread the one with the crazy artist/Salvador Dali character..? that one was great

i'm definitely doing some torrenting tonight, i only have the 70s stuff

xpost No, that one was by Tony Salmons which I love as well. The Golden dealt with Strange (SPOILER!!!!) grieving over Clea and then entering some alternate Marvelverse where everything is a facade (maaaan). Sort of an "A Christmas Carol" type scenario if I recall. Gotta dig that one up again.

To get back on track here I cannot wait to go see this flick.

xpost that's giving me dematteis defenders feelings

aka i'm in

http://www.supermegamonkey.net/chronocomic/entries/doctor_strange_55.shtml

I'd forgotten about 'Les' and 'Ted'! Terry Austin inks, always helps.

my main concern is that this movie will have flashes of psychedelia but ultimately it'll end up with doctor strange and the villain going more-or-less conventionally toe-to-toe at an nyc landmark

well, this ended up having some pretty genuinely wiggy sequences, the wiggiest of which weren't hinted at in any of the trailers i saw, and the ending was a bit cleverer than i expected, so i guess it's a thumbs-up from me in that regard. hey kids: watch this movie on shrooms!

it's enjoyable overall, and there are a few shots where i thought 'wow benedict cumberbatch looks just like doctor strange!' but it did suffer a bit from superhero-origin-story syndrome and the timeline of his training seems weirdly, unnecessarily compressed. poor rachel mcadams is wasted in a thankless role, tilda swinton and benedict wong are fun, and the doctor's cape puts in an unexpectedly charismatic performance. solidly mid-tier marvel movie i guess?

apart from the relatively original resolution to the big boss battle and the occasional visual bit (although the Inception-style effects didn't do it for me at all) this is probably the most Marvel Marvel movie yet. Competent, respectful, but ultimately pretty tedious.

McAdams, Mikkelsen and Ejiofor shouldn't have bothered (weird to see Michael Stuhlbarg too, but he probably needed the cheque), and the attempts at snarky humour are really bad too.

rubbish, rubbish, rubbish

earned nothing. impossible to follow. tedious cliche after cliche rushed through. unbeatable odds for incredible stakes explained by bored actors in harry potter level performances and the inevitable handy resolution happened somewhere left of screen just before credits id have been embarrassed to have my name in.

I would think "tedious cliche after tedious cliche rushed through" would be really easy to follow

they were. they had fuck all to do with advancing anything more than marvels next cheque.

...

Can't wait!

Any thoughts on the controversy over Tilda Swinton being Tilda Swinton and not Tibetan? On the one hand, whitewashing (though, weirdly, to ensure access to the Chinese market by not having a Tibetan character). On the other hand, the comic book Ancient One is a Western cliche of an Asian wise man, so ... dunno.

If you have no moral problem with, and indeed get excited just anticipating queuing up to, giving money over and over to Marvel, given the way it's treated human beings for the last 55 years, but you get huffy about the casting of imaginary space wizards in one of their films, you're a fucking clown

A lot of the people angry about this probably don't know about Marvel's history. I did see some Asian sff writers suggest to their twitter followers not seeing this film, Great Wall and Ghost In The Shell for the whitewashing.

I think a lot of people probably differ on who they hold accountable for a company's ugly history. The individuals who did the bad things (many of whom are gone) or just holding the company responsible for every wrong they haven't righted.

Ancient One is a cliche but minus the racial caricature in some portrayals he doesn't seem much different to me than innumerable wise old men in Asian fantasy and martial arts stories. I don't see how that could be worse than whitewashing.

seems almost just as fucked up to suggest that casting an asian in that role will result in a stereotype so better not

As long as Marvel maintains a high level of diversity in their casting in general, they can assign roles to whichever actors they feel are most appropriate afaic. While there's outrage at not hiring an Asian actor to portray the Ancient One or (bafflingly) Iron Fist, there's not much positive attention paid to the fact that they've hired a number of non-white actors to portray characters that have traditionally been white in the comics or that, for example, they've chosen to bring the newer Latino version of Ghost Rider into the MCU rather than the previous versions.

Thought the way they handled The Mandarin in Iron Man 3 was a pretty elegant solution to the problem of bringing horrendous 1960s racial caricatures into the 21st century.

I think I got this from ILX in the first place, but: http://www.cbr.com/opinion-i-dont-want-an-asian-american-iron-fist/

In general I'm not offended, but the specific reason for making this films wise one not Tibetan is fucking disgusting.

If anything, the idea of pushing Marvel to cast an Asian actor as Iron Fist feels a little racist. "Because he does martial arts, see? Why would a white guy do that stuff?"

xpost Agreed on that point.

Shang Chi was the asian guy and son of Fu Manchu or something wasn't he?
Iron Fist was intentionally a rich white guy I thought

Yeah, that's right. Maybe people confused the two characters?

So long as Iron Fist has a fist like unto a thing of iron, I'm cool as to who plays him

My feelings about the Ancient One are complicated by me generally being in favor of more Tilda Swinton everywhere all the time.

shes really good in this tbf

classic RAG, classic sic, good work everyone

???

just listened to the score on Spotify and it far, far exceeded my expectations. Michael Giacchino bats about .500 for me (Let Me In and John Carter were great scores, his Star Trek stuff spotty) but this is one of the best things he's done and probably my favorite score album from any of these Marvel Universe things (though I have love for the first two -- silvestri/cap and doyle/thor).

Seen that P Craig Russell collection (which has Sandy Plunkett too) with a bunch of other Dr Strange books today. It probably wouldn't take too long to read most of Dr Strange. I might get this stuff someday if it ever comes out without the hateful recoloring.
Also seen Russell's Elric stuff with decent scans.

I wonder if all this is going to make Dr Strange a bigger character with more stories or if he'll just go back to his regular status.
I never read any Namor comics but if he gets a film I suspect people won't be enthusiastic about the reprints. I think he's quite cool and his setting is a huge opportunity but aside from John Byrne, Bill Everett, Fantastic Four, I don't think there are many fan favourite stories about him.

I may have asked this before but was there a Warren Ellis story in which the Ancient One sexually abuses Baron Mordo?

if there wasn't, 'ol Warren was asleep at the desk that dat

Enjoyed this. Do like that Kaleidoscope visual thing. Might be a bit cliched in places but I think it overcomes it, certainly not another X-Men Apocalypse. Quite fun really.

Comes with 2 scenes after the start of the end credits. One places it further into the Marvel Universe and the other presumably sets up a sequel.
There's also a warning right at the end of the credits about being distracted while driving being dangerous, which I thought quite apt.

WARNING: distracted driving could lead to passing through several trials and becoming an awesome superhero

Thought this was very by-the-numbers Marvel flick except for the trippy visuals, which were great

Hadn't realised that US didn't get this til today. I saw it a week after it appeared.
Still thinking US get films way before we do. & that we'd be behind UK too. But Xmen Apocalypse had a similar release schedule I think.
Odd since I'd think of Marvel films as being from the US.

now for ya

This is a fun movie

This was basically fun - the kind of thing where you have a good time the whole way through, and it's only once it's over that you start realizing all this stuff that didn't really hang together or get resolved, and wondering whether the often-jokey tone cheapened the affair or was the only way to make this fundamentally goofy premise work onscreen. Better than trying to do it all dark and foreboding, I think. I did like how hard they went in Strange being a genuine total asshole at the beginning, but then that isn't really convincingly paid off: he doesn't really become more humble or learn to meditate or go with the flow or anything, and he wins in the end the same way RDJ did in the first Iron Man, by being mister oh-so-clever at the right time. I get how they probably THOUGHT his clever move (trying to avoid specific spoilers) sorta paid off some of the themes, but it just didn't work especially after his training (which I agree was way too compressed - felt like weeks rather than months or years) seemed mostly about martial arts and reading books, the latter of which he was already good at. His storyline with McAdams really didn't resolve well at all either - what should have been a big big moment between them got sort of thrown off by all the comic-relief stuff in that sequence (funny though it was).

Swinton ultimately was playing the "there is no spoon" kid from the Matrix over a whole movie - just not complete enough as a person for us to care what choices she ends up making. Everyone else did manage to elevate their parts a bit above what the movie would look like on paper - a shame Ejiofor's character kinda makes no sense, but he does what he can - and Cumberbatch was really enjoyable to watch I thought.

Thing is, for all that, the comic bits really were funny even if it has that Force Awakens thing where you suspect the movie would be considerably stronger with, say, five or six fewer jokes. And the action and trippy stuff were all well done if not wildly original. We were way down in the front row and it was sort of impossible to even understand what was happening in most of the action scenes but I think that helped the movie a bit. The main thing I was glad of was that we got any "trippy journey through astral planes and Sights Man Was Not Meant To See" type stuff, which is like the whole reason to bother with a Dr. Strange movie at all but the thing you could most easily see somebody chopping out in order to make more of a "it's superheroes but also Harry Potter!" kind of movie. Overall, for one of their lighter or more comic efforts, it's not quite as fun or consistent as Ant-Man but boy it could have been a lot worse.

Yer a wizard, Steven!!

That car accident was really brutal!

one aside: "sling ring" sounds totally stupid and out of place here. if they had to make up a gimmicky object to enable dropped-lightsaber "o no" shots, they should have called it anything but "sling ring."

'tomfoolery jewellery'

Thanks beefheart

I have yet to have seen more than a couple 3D movies that really benefited from being in 3D. Typically I avoid 3D movies, not just because they are a waste of money but also because I and especially the kids don't like wearing the glasses. So the question is, should I see this in 3D?