Benedict Cumberbatch IS Doctor Strange.

Yeah, that's called the last 50 years, dipping _slightly_ when Gen X had the mic.

― Andrew Farrell, Tuesday, 8 November 2016 15:55

I know all sorts of people are very attached to all sorts of products but I think (perhaps wrongly) that for geeks it generally runs far deeper and becomes more religious.

like when the Brady Bunch movie came out people didn't say it destroyed their childhood

semi-ironic commercialization was pretty cool at the time

like wow, we liked some garbage, let's lightly mock it in comedic movie form.

buying my OK Soda, acknowledging "I am a consumer, and how!" with a big grin and pointing at the cool independent art on the can

now it's this humorless, unflinching need for parity with history and perceived parity. any wink at the audience about how the original work was full of bad ideas from the time is seen as an attack

do you guys like watch sports

Brady Bunch movie was p good tbh

no pro sports are garbage

xp

or rather

no, pro sports are garbage

sports are fine, not that into them, seem like people get pretty into them

do you guys like watch sports

― Nhex, Tuesday, 8 November 2016 16:26

No but I'm not sure if you're alluding to the sponsors or the way people follow teams, which never made sense to me and doesn't make sense to people when I ask them why they're so invested in a specific team. But that's only team sports.

Right, but it is massive capitalist pop culture, and has been for a long time.

no IPs though

Not sure about the US vs the UK - I'd be amazed if the former was easier on EG selling significant amounts of bootleg merchandise. Isn't there some thing about being unable to reproduce anything with baseball footage without the express permission of MLB?

no narrative-based IPs then

player trajectories, personalities, all that crap that's hated by about half the players is pretty narrative-based! "will lebron be the greatest since blah blah" basketball stuff, along with the star players having really lucrative merchandising

I mean, however many years after Michael Jordan stopped playing basketball, Air Jordans are still a strong brand

"weird hyper consumerism going on w unhealthily strong emotional attachments to products." - if you say that sports don't count for some reason that's fine, but I'm not currently seeing why.

not to mention the near ceaseless clowning of those steph curry shoes

the entire starter jacket thing which was huuuge when I was a kid, to the point where people with no investment in actual sports had them and picked them based on colors/team mascot imagery

https://img1.etsystatic.com/030/0/7585222/il_570xN.657173131_1t4r.jpg

being a comics/sff/gamer kid in the early 80s didn't feel like being a sports fan at all, thank god

though that happens to also be the last time i cared about sports

Looking at all their video archive, what a wasteland.
Really disappointed that for all the discussion of social justice in fandom/geek culture, it seems like nobody is challenging the gross consumerism and franchise obsession/loyalty.

I've heard criticisms that young social justice people aren't really interested in criticizing rampant capitalism but I doubt that's a widespread problem among them. But it does seem like a lot of them are mostly into the biggest pop culture (poptimists?).

It's not part of the culture yet, is it? The kinda folks who are most gung-ho about genre entertainment and spreading it online tend not to be the ones who'd be able to handle doing a critique of it.

Then again, this kind of thought is firewalled into academic (sub)culture. Hell, even Jacobin only has like three articles about this stuff.

Might need to introduce you to a site called Tumblr, Kingfish...

Or, it's in the culture but it isn't the culture yet, it will be when the people who are 25 now will be 45.

I really don't know what fans and players could do to change things in sport but I think it is necessary to criticize specific cultural areas rather than only criticizing consumerism as a whole.

And I think there are probably negative aspects to tied into consumerist geek culture that aren't only due to our current economic system, which you could get rid of but you'd still have hype for time/attention.

Sad to see people my age so predictably whining that these days aren't as cool as the 80s and 90s and wallowing in nostalgia so soon.

I owned that shirt Adam linked but never got into sports. Liked Kriss Kross, though.

watched the RLM video. yeah they don't touch on the Tibet/China politics at all for some "both sides are complaining!" bs. they could have mentioned the real world politics involved but apparently it's too nuanced to fit into their simplistic PC/not-PC dichotomy.

I really don't know what fans and players could do to change things in sport but I think it is necessary to criticize specific cultural areas rather than only criticizing consumerism as a whole.

And I think there are probably negative aspects to tied into consumerist geek culture that aren't only due to our current economic system, which you could get rid of but you'd still have hype for time/attention.

I think this is more what I'm referring to; plenty of Tumblr et al gets into identity and representation, but maybe I just haven't hit enough sources both knowledgeable of and fans of nerdshit who are able to dig into the economics of it other than very superficial means.

This was okay. I didn't get my fantasy of a Splet/Lynch sound design for maximum creepiness, oh well. It moved the MCU along and introduced a big player. Very imaginative fight choreography. Most of the attempted jokes fell flat, imo. The idea of the cloak being sentient and opinionated is pretty cool. Good MCU fan service, but I wouldn't recommend it to any non-Marvelite.

LOL at no IP connected to major league sports

https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/f/f7/Odell_Beckham_Jr._Madden_NFL_16_Cover.jpg

https://media.easports.com/content/www-easports/en_US/fifa/news/2015/fifa-16-cover-athletes/_jcr_content/par/image_9.img.jpg

Finally got over my post-election trauma enough to go and see this. I won't say they were objectively the best special effects ever but they might've been my favorite special effects ever. Although it didn't go balls out wrt having Strange battle cosmic entities in altogether unfamiliar environments, I think it was a pretty fair compromise for a big blockbustery movie, and that final Dark Dimension sequence certainly did it for me on a visual level. Also, I'm not a motion sickness sufferer at all and I can generally handle shaky cameras and frenetically disorienting sequences all day long but the NYC battle sequence had me feeling some legit vertigo. A+ use of 3D. Overall, up there with the ending of 2001 and the DMT scenes from Enter the Void on the trippiness scale.

Also the movie was fun and good like all of the other MCU movies and I acknowledge once again that I have little in the way of critical distance when it comes to well-adapted Marvel properties.

i really enjoyed this - admittedly i went in with little to no expectations

but it felt like a legit adventure & i loved the way the effects blended with the dimensional superpowers stuff. also Tilda looked kinda like Tripitaka from Monkey Magic <3

FINALLY saw this. Doctor Casino OTM; it was really fun, not quite as good as Ant Man (which really punches above its weight class re: expectation vs actual experience of watching the movie).

I am not super familiar with Stephen Strange's origins so I kept wondering if he REALLY was the magical Tony Stark in the comic books or if it was shorthand characterization to acclimate people to the character.

Yeah we watched it a couple of weeks back here -- not bad, if it's of a Marvel type it was still engaging enough, and the trippier sequences looked fantastic.

I fast-forwarded through most of this. the initial trip-out sequence w the Ancient One was p good.

I am pretty happy that my least favorite of these movies has been Iron Man 2, which I still enjoyed.

casting was terrible, origin story was yawnsville, yr usual Marvel Movieverse bullshit imo

I dunno why but I am still curious about Ant-Man. In general all of the Marvel movies lack drama/tension imo and as soon as they're over I have no interest in ever seeing them again, they're all so rote and stiff, with nothing at stake.

Maybe you're curious because it's the one we've been saying to watch?

I have not been saying to watch it, but if you want "The MCU movie to watch if you hate MCU movies" then it's a good fit.

I would think that is self-evident, but my predisposition to various castmembers (Rudd, Pena, um Turkington)

xp

is also a factor, I meant to add there

I guess when I was saying "I dunno why" what I really meant was "in the face of all these movies being terrible and against my better judgment I still am curious about Ant-Man"

You should catch ant man. I agree with you about all the others btw, decent popcorn fodder but tiresomely self aggrandising with a dash of good comedy chops.

Ant man is that but not as self aggrandising and cast is good

it's ok to watch things you might like

if you end up liking it we can walk you through how to post positive opinions

tiresomely self aggrandising with a dash of good comedy chops

accurate

if you end up liking it we can walk you through how to post positive opinions

you read the wrong threads, I am positive about all sorts of shit

darragh otm

I'm overly into comics garbage and the amount of joy I get from watching each progressive ensemble cast Marvel movie has bottomed out but Ant Man was fun

Peyton Reed comes from more of a comedy background so it gives everything a certain rhythm and flair. These two scenes alone are worth the price of admission.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lYUFx_Ltjn8

Wife and I gave this a shot too a couple of weeks ago despite being extremely superhero-movie-averse. Gave up after about an hour, don't remember exactly what I said upon switching it off but it was the equivalent of DDDOOOONNN'TTTT CAAARRREEE. Same was true with Avengers and Deadpool, then again I liked Nolan's Batman flicks so I know I'm a real outlier here. Idk, I really do try to not be a snob about anything pop culture but I just find this shit to be aggressively stupid.

the first two Nolan Batman flicks are fine

first two X-Men movies are fine too

Fine is overpraise for the first and incorrect on second batman flicks