Marvel Cinematic Universe, Phase 4 & Beyond (and a chance to change your vote)

"Werewolf by Night" was slight but enjoyable enough.

I was finding this show a bit too meta and glib, but the Daredevil episode was good, especially because of Leapfrog, what a twat.

RIBBIT AND RIP IT

I wasn’t too into She-Hulk for most of its run, and my dislike of Love and Thunder made me wonder if I was finally done with the MCU (probably not, but anyway). But the last two episodes were really good! Great to see Matt again, Cox seemed super happy to be back in that role

Very very happy with Werewolf by Night

If Gael Garcia Bernal gets even a smidgen of MCU money - great
Impeccable casting of Harriet Sansom Harris
Short and sweet
60s-late 70s Marvel is my sweet spot so though horror comics not my top faves still happy
Cliched - perhaps - but Judy Garland is never something I will be unhappy about ( & Vera Lynn!)
and tribute to 30s b+w horror movies

I still just can’t believe my childhood comics are on screen so may overlook stuff just out of childhood dreams being realized in decent to great live-action (THO still bitter that my 2 faves as a kid (Scarlet Witch and Dr Strange) not been great in MCU)

BUT Werewolf was great fun,
She-Hulk been giving me many giggles, esp Walk of Shame

Not the majestic march to Endgame but nobody expected that to begin with so I’ll give em some space

Carry on

Yeah, WWBN was fun. One of my favorite bits was the cue marks every few minutes on the "film."

Heh, my older daughter asked me what those were.

So is there a running tally somewhere of just how many super people/creatures are running around the MCU?

omg Werewolf was great

lots of good stylistic references, i could watch it on repeat all day just for the ~look~

flaming tuba forever

Really fun. I just wish the other hunters felt a little more threatening/skilled.

We've been catching up on "Ms. Marvel," and while we're not done yet, I do love how all these shows keep literally expanding the MCU. Different cities, different countries, etc., in addition to the different characters. Related, fascinating to learn that the Karachi street scenes in "Marvel" were apparently filmed outside Bangkok!

https://www.hollywoodreporter.com/movies/movie-news/blade-movie-on-hold-as-marvel-1235238872/

lol, yeah, really, you probably should have locked down that director and especially the script part before you started production.

Wow. She-Hulk finale was absolutely wild.

Loved those opening credits too.

Another WWBN satisfied customer. Not 100% on Man-Thing's history - has he ever had a consciousness? I only know him/it as the "whoever knows fear burns at the Man-Thing's touch" / Nexus of All Realities shuffling beast, relatively mindless. I liked this Ted interpretation a lot.

jings

/Film can independently confirm that Harrison Ford will play Gen. Thunderbolt Ross in #Thunderbolts.https://t.co/BnI7ttWQPy

— /Film (@slashfilm) October 13, 2022

I thought the She-Hulk finale was excellent and set it well apart from all other series, obviously deliberately steered that way but in a very fitting way, done really well.
The entire series could sometimes frustrate me a little, as it had a 30m comedy/sitcom format but half of the episodes weren't really funny enough to match that style. But that finale and the Madisynn and DD episodes were really, really great.

Wasn't overwhelmed with Werewolf By Night myself. I did have a lot of appreciation for the way it was filmed, the classic horror style and especially all the lighting effects and enjoyed it enough, but overall the story, dialogue and characters didn't do much for me. Mind that while I'm a Marvel nut, I never got into their horror stuff/the source material for this at all. I do have got some good stuff with Elsa Bloodstone but I get that obviously nothing from Nextwave would fit in a feature like this.
The ww transformation scene did look amazing (the flickering lights and the shadow on the wall) but I thought his subsequent look was a bit disappointingly silly, although I know that it was very faithful to the comics.
Man-thing looked really good, but I had the same doubts as in body of a spider's hidden comment, I also am not aware of a conscious Man-Thing who responds to Ted Sallis' name. I'm not sure if I like this interpretation all that much - in the final scene with him and Jack, I found him a bit too similar to Groot like this..

Final She-Hulk was tons of fun. Did they only have Charlie Cox for a day? Because he did so little to hide his Irish accent I thought for a second he was leaving it on purpose.

he's English

huh. wonder what was up with his accent, we both heard Irish!

loved the she-hulk finale, super fun
and always glad for more charlie!

THe Druid's Ball Turner prize winning installation was on exhibition in Galway for a month and a half recently. In the film of the actual Ball held in Belfast there is a part of a performance by drag artist Rosa Tralee who uses the phrase that she has her divaship as part of a talk she is giving which turns into a chant when she takes the audience outside at the end of the night. So that was running through my head when She-Hulk was described as a Diva at the end.

Ants ants ants

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZlNFpri-Y40

kang kang kang

Caroline Polachek, there's money to be made!

Into me
Kang! and I go
Into you
Kang! and you go
Into me ...

So! I watched No Way Home. I was not expecting....to be so moved by such a cynical way to join the three Spider-Men and their most iconic villains, especially since I've no attachments to the original films w/ the mild exception of Tobey Maguire's second try.

But I know the comics, and I forgot how well Willem Dafoe and Alfred Molina embodied their roles. I sorta wonder how the younger audience members several months ago responded when they appeared -- or even when Andrew Garfield and Tobey Maguire did.

OTM, except for me it’s the first Raimi film (which I’ve found holds up well, even though it’s overlong).

Rewatching Far From Home (that’s the second one, if you get the titles mixed up like I do)— it’s actually pretty good, it’s just the Mysterio parts that are a drag. I don’t like storylines where the good guys get “tricked” by a big, complicated deceit.

So...Wakanda Forever anyone? Given it's been such a full week with everything I almost feel like this just suddenly finally happened, but saw it Thursday: not the first film by default but not trying to be -- imagining what it would be like if Boseman hadn't passed and you can see how the bones of the story with Namor would have happened. Often a mood piece, an elegant extended farewell in many ways, down to the usual mid-credits scene.

I’m looking forward to seeing it soon - pretty much down for anything Coogler does at this point

seeing it later today, a bit daunted by the running time and I'm overall feeling pretty disinterested in this franchise, but whatever.

I thought it was good, and for long stretches it even felt like a real movie, but it was also kind of slow and long and overly solemn (albeit for obvious reasons). Parts of it gave me "Eternals" vibes, tbh, though "The Eternals" was slow and long and really stupid, too, and "Black Panther 2" wasn't stupid. Mostly I like the idea of this movie of warring blue water people taking the wind out of the sails of next big movie about warring blue water people.

Oh, fwiw, this was the first movie in forever where the first theatre we went to was sold out through the end of the day, so we had to go somewhere else.

Ok this is very good. Agree that there are big chunks of this that feel like a real movie and not just a Marvel Entertainment.

I read a pull quote from Armond White’s review of this and seriously why is he still alive but Chadwick Boseman is dead? Like if you wanted actual proof that life is capricious and random and that there’s no benevolent diety guiding things along a master plan, there you go

I wasn't expecting this to be as good as it is, partly because generally speaking I find Leticia Wright kind of annoying, but she carried this well and her dramatic work, particularly at the very end, was great. there are a lot of really great looking scenes in this and the underwater stuff comes across much more convincingly than similar stuff in Aquaman. Marvel films that touch on grander conspiracy themes have a tendency to get bogged down in plot machinations that I have a hard time following or recalling from one movie to the next but this moved along briskly without overt storytelling complications. I did think I had found a plot hole when it was over, but that was resolved about 60 seconds later in a mid-credits scene.

What was the plot hole?

they never explained who the Best Boy was

Nice interview on Why Marvel Films Look Like That

https://www.techwontsave.us/episode/142_why_visual_effects_look_the_way_they_do_w_julie_turnock

(ILM and because Jon Favreau really liked the look of “Empire Strikes Back”)

xp Lol x3

it's good that films are now putting their running times right there in the title

(heh, we made that joke at the dinner table yesterday.)

It’s a deeply unfunny joke

lot of weird critical soul searching from reviewers about "why don't i like wakanda forever more than i do, am i a bad person"

my main gripe is that they should have had Winston Duke say "fish man" more times because it was funnier every time

"Guardians of the Galaxy Holiday Special" had its silly/sweet/stupid moments, but I'm not sure James Gunn should have boasted that it took him just a couple of hours to write.

the star wars holiday special took 48 hours on quaaludes to write

They seem to be ramping up the promo machine hype rhythm:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=u3V5KDHRQvk

Going big on the music there

looks like a cross between two story arcs that they've teased (Rocket's past, Adam Warlock) and who knows, might work?

I feel like Gunn's attention is kind of split between projects and hopefully Pratt gets third or fourth screentime in this one

outside of MCU, if you have a chance to play the Guardians video game, I'd recommend it. kind of a rail-style adventure game that's competently executed across the board, with no real curveballs but a thought-out plot and funny Adam Warlock speeches in full alliteration mode and ridiculous Infinity saga trappings (that darn Magus!)

oh, and the fact they land on what looks like earth with critters, probably the High Evolutionary?