Benedict Cumberbatch IS Doctor Strange.

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

rly want to watch dr strange just havent gotten around to it

rudd is a mixed bag

definitely netflixing or torrenting both

We watched Dr Strange the other night. I was disappointed. Way too much origin story, and I didn't get why Strange was the chosen one or whatever. He seemed impatient, arrogant, etc. which makes me think he wouldn't be good at learning the ways of magick. Also, the usual MCU sense of humor seemed out-of-place in Dr Strange.

Ant Man was good, though. The Thomas scene slayed me.

Ant-man had the good sense not to take itself seriously, but that only made its villain problem worse, imo. Wow, another crazy military guy who wants to use the technology to take over the world ...

Dr. Strange, if anything, didn't take itself seriously enough, imo, and for a movie set on a cosmic scale spent a little too much time on redundant fights between Strange and the same 3 bad guys. Liked the evil cosmic villain, though.

i saw this last weekend, it was pretty awesome. the kaliedoscopic effects were really cool. i also liked the ending. how they won that final battle was pretty clever.

one cool trick

I didn't get why Strange was the chosen one or whatever. He seemed impatient, arrogant, etc.

well tbf at the end of the movie he still didn't get what he initially went searching for

Yeah the arc bothers me more, looking back on the film. He doesn't really have to grow or change at all, he just chooses a different career. The idea must be that, oh, see, he sacrifices himself over and over, the old Strange wouldn't do that. But he knows he's got it all figured out and he expects to come out okay in the end, so we're still in smug Iron Man territory. He'd be a much more interesting and distinctive character going forward if his thing was he is brought to do real introspection and soul-searching, he becomes humble in some real way. But actually everything pays off his assumption that he's the greatest at everything for no reason. Doctor Privilege.

I like how there's this template for british actors to just mimic Hugh Laurie's approximation of an american accent

I have to say, I think that's a pretty shallow reading of it. He's not the same man at the end as the start, and it's important to spot that the solution to the final confrontation is to threaten Dormammu with an eternity with Stephen Strange - he has belatedly reached the wisdom to realise that he's an absolute weapons-grade asshole.

Lashing him with that accent for eternity

forgot this thread existed, posted this to Rolling MCU

Doctor Strange is a very good looking nothing-burger of a movie

Rachel McAdams as Christine Palmer was the most memorable character, I think. Certainly the only one I actually sort of cared about, and they didn't even bother to put her in any peril other than having an astral punch-up sort of knock some things around. They somehow got Mads Mikkelsen to be a terrible, boring villain who strides so purposefully everywhere he goes it's like an inside joke we're not in on.

any credit for christine palmer has gotta go 100% to rachel mcadams cuz man that was one terribly underwritten and one-dimensional character. mcadams is the real magician in this movie imo *arches eyebrow mystically*