Up in the Great White North, Quebec City. Spent just the one night in the old city. Elegance, delicious food, and style of France with the welcoming of Canada.
There is a photo of Rosalyn Carter with Jimmy in profile. She is basically dead center facing the photographer. Jimmy is in profile whispering in her ear and she is trying and basically failing to stifle a giggle.
It is such a sweet, endearing photo of a bonded pair.
Imagine a world where Carter wins a second term. I was 17. Couldn’t vote.
I spent a bit of time in Francophone Canada, mostly in Montreal. In my mid 20’s I briefly lived in Burlington. Good town, kinda boring. I wasn’t even there long enough to get a Vermont driver’s license. We would do weekend jaunts up to Montreal. Border control back then was pretty casual. What is the purpose of your trip? Dicking around, mostly. Have a nice visit!
I semi spoke French – four semesters in college were not totally wasted – so I was the front guy, the talker, in most situations. Speak simple declarative sentences slowly, and I catch 40% of that.
I have heard Quebec is gorgeous. Have a fantastic trip!
I have to been to Thunder Bay and environs, Winnipeg, Montreal, Banff, PEI.
Did a rail trip from Thunder Bay to Banff and back on the Canadian version of Amtrak in the cheapest roomette accommodation available that didn’t have a room-mate. I am prone to anxiety and need private down-time to decompress.
@de stijl: I remember having to fly to Canada in the ’90s on the spur of a moment request from a client. Not knowing what the actual requirements were, I grabbed my then-expired passport, which I sheepishly presented to Canadian immigration control wondering if I would be turned back. I learned “expired US passport” was literally on the list of acceptable identification. Probably not anymore.
Of course in the early ’80s, I used to drive across southern Ontario on my way from Illlinois to Massachusetts. If there was even a crossing gate at either end of that, I don’t remember it.
I haven’t been to Canada since I was nine years old or August 1970. Why we went to Quebec still puzzles me except for maybe my parents wanted to take us children somewhere other than Florida or Columbus Ohio*.
One thing that supposedly happened in Quebec was this.
My mother and father would often have a glass of wine with dinner. We were at a restaurant and my parents ordered it.
After taking the order the waiter said something like ‘What will the children be having?’
Dad replied ‘Our children** can’t have wine.’
‘Monsieur, you are not in Pennsylvania***.
Another happening was Dad being challenged to a drag race with all of us in the family’s 1967 Pontiac Bonneville****. Dad accepted the challenge and beat the other car away from the traffic light two times. At a third light, the driver surrendered.
Since I was nine at the time, I’m not totally sure if these aren’t family urban legends.
*- Due to my father owning race horses, we went to the Ohio State Fair like 3 or 4 times between 1967 and the very early 70’s. Harness racing took place at the fair and the driver/trainer Dad was most associated with- Bruce Nickells- had horses there.
**- On that trip were me, my 7 yo brother, brothers 12 and 13, my sister who was 17 and one of her close friends of the same age.
***- The drinking age in most of the United States was 18 at the time. Pennsylvania was 21.
****- Pontiac Bonnevilles supposedly had great engines in them.
New York Times reporter Maggie Haberman says that there’s a real effort underway to convince Trump to choose Tucker Carlson as his running mate.
Somehow I doubt it. Carlson’s a celebrity is his own right, with a huge fan base, and he’s younger and better-looking than Trump. That’s too much competition for the spotlight. Trump always has to be the star.
Imagine a world where Carter wins a second term. I was 17. Couldn’t vote.
Let’s forget nostalgia.
With the exception of the Camp David accords, most of the Carter presidency was a train wreck. He had strong opposition in the democratic primaries so he took what was called at the time as ‘the rose garden’ strategy, don’t forget he approved the awful Operation Eagle Claw to rescue the hostages in Iran and not surprisingly was a complete debacle. Throw in high inflation and unemployment, it should come as no surprise American voters threw him out in November 1980. His defeat ranks with Herbert Hoover’s 1932 loss as the worst in American history for an incumbent President.
I remember Bob Hope or somebody else singing in regards to Carter
Thanks for the memories
Of Begin and Sadat
Hamilton and his pot
Billy drinking beer in the parking lot. Thanks so much.
BTW I was 19 at the time and I voted for John Anderson.
Oh I almost forgot Carter’s purge of cabinet members in the summer of 1979, and Democrat Congressman Charlie Wilson’s quote in the aftermath.
“Good grief! He’s cut down the tall trees and left the monkeys.”
@Bill Jempty: That does not surprise me at all…when we lived in Germany when I was a teen, waiters were happy to serve me a glass of wine when I went out to dinner with my parents (I was ages 13-15 while we were there). When we went to France, we saw kids as young as 6 or 7 with glasses of wine cut with water–generally speaking, you could tell the ages of the kids by how diluted (or not) their wine was with dinner.
I used to live a little bit over a mile from the Minnesota State Fairgrounds nestled in a really boring neighborhood in northern St. Paul. People would park on my street and walk there. Is Falcon Heights a neighborhood designation or a tiny inner suburb? Not sure.
Unless you got there before 8, 8:30 all the lots at the fairgrounds were full up. Folks would drive up and down nearby streets looking for a curb parking spot. Good freaking luck with that!
There should have been more parking. Multi-story garages. Underground. But the state fair only happens once a year. It would be inefficient to build more parking.
The brilliant, seat of the pants, unplanned, efficient solution was that homeowners who lived nearby would rent out their yards as parking lots. You can cram a crap ton of cars onto a residential yard. It was like Tetris the way they arranged it.
The organic solution. Folks would develop a parasocial relationship. I always park at Jenny’s – she’s the best.
In a lot of states the state fair is no big deal, who cares? In Minnesota, Iowa, Texas it’s a big freaking deal. Daily attendance is 100000 plus on weekdays and 250000 or more on weekends. It goes on for 12 days.
If you are a nearby homeowner who rents out yard parking space you can make 10 grand easy in green cash the IRS doesn’t need to know about. Some folks hire out a day worker to manage the whole shebang.
I got a flu shot, finally. I may be having a reaction to it, which would be a first for this type of vaccine. So far it’s only a little discomfort on the arm, not bad enough to call it even a minor ache.
Threads accessed on a PC browser now lets you set up without downloading the app to your phone. So, it still mines data, but not as insidiously.
Benito needs to pick a vp who’s so bad and capable, not even his worst enemies would think of assassinating him because it would put the vp in charge. Any suggestions?
I learned “expired US passport” was literally on the list of acceptable identification. Probably not anymore.
Before 9-11 we visited my brother in northern Minnesota. At one point we decided, since it was only a couple miles out of our way on a county road, we’d drive into Canada just so my wife could say she’d been there. It was evening, we were concerned the crossing might be closed. And we weren’t sure how they’d react to, “Our business? We’re just going to drive around the block and leave.” As it turned out there was no one in the guard shack and the gate was open.
@Bill Jempty: One, John. B. Anderson had been my congressman for years. Saying he was retiring from Congress because he was tired of pandering to his right wing supporters (Rockford IL was for some reason a hotbed of Birchers) didn’t erase his two decades of pandering to them. Two, you’d have preferred Gerald Ford?
O Canada
One summer morning in 1969, pre Amtrak, a friend and I boarded the Illinois Central passenger train in Carbondale, Illinois northbound to Chicago 309 miles*. We changed trains in Chicago and boarded a train to Detroit 283 miles. We took a bus that went in a tunnel through the Detroit River to Windsor, Canada. At that time no US Passport was required to enter Canada. I do remember presenting my Illinois Drivers License which in those days was a piece of paper a bit larger than a business card with no photograph. We exchanged currency and made our way to the local Canadian passenger rail station. From Windsor we rode to Toronto 231 miles (372 km, thank you Google Maps) and changed to a train bound for Montreal 336 miles (542 km). In Montreal we caught another train to Québec City 167 miles (269 km). During the run between Windsor and Toronto the train crew spoke english. From Toronto to Montreal all announcements were made in both English and French. English was dropped between Montreal and Québec City and my friend who was fluent in French had to tell me everything the train crew was saying. Don’t remember the exact timetable but I do know that there was an overnight stretch. We road coach for the whole 2650+ mile round trip and I think that I got a few hours of sleep at night each way. In Québec City we found an old Hotel inside the walled city. The only person who spoke English to us the entire visit was the fellow who checked us in. The two days we spent walking around Québec City went all too fast. One thing I learned right away was that there was no way that I could order black coffee. It seemed to be available with cream only.
When in Québec City do as they do. Or something like that.
*Rail miles are from today’s railroad timetables in USA and Canada or highway miles if I can’t find the RR miles. I know it was the IC between Carbondale and Chicago but can’t remember names of the other railroads. No map that I can find shows a passenger RR connection between Chicago and Detroit in 1969. The route would have had to go through Indiana so there’s no telling which line we took.
WikiP tells me that Via Rail was established in 1977 in Canada so we likely traveled Canadian National or Canadian Pacific passenger service.
Andy Dick
Dane Cook
Tom Cruise
Kathy Griffin
Kevin Sorbo
Awkwafina
Stephen Dorff
Sean Hannity
Kanye West
Kirk Cameron
Jake Paul
Ana Navarro
Stephen Dorff might be a lovely man in real life but his ott acting choices make me want to punch him. There is German compound word I can never remember… backpfeifengesicht. A face in need of a fist. (Ty Google!)
The Trump veepstakes will be interesting. My prediction is that it won’t be a politician, but a past their prime fading but not entirely forgotten non-toxic celebrity type. Trump does not now need to buff up his bona fides with a steady hand R politician as a back-up. We are way, way past that point. Likely R voters do not care about that stuff at all.
Let’s use Fabio as a temporary stand-in. He’s ineligible, but is of the type and nature I’m alluding to. A fading celebrity who is willing to be submissive to him for gain. Trump no longer needs a guy like Pence to buff his credentials. He’s fully branded now; we know exactly what we are going to get.
Kevin Sorbo might not be a bad call, but a woman and/or a minority might win the focus group.
For those following the Disney slash woke saga, I’m afraid the anti-wokists (word?) have won. The trades now acknowledge that ham-fisted DEI has done serious damage to Marvel and Star Wars. Even someone like Grace Randolph – sworn enemy of the Nerdrotic camp – has admitted the narrative is baked and ready to slice.
In reality of course DEI is only one factor, but it’s silly to pretend it’s not a factor at all, or to blame it all on misogynist trolls. The factors include market saturation – too much product, not enough art – and superhero fatigue, and godawful writing and a headlong rush into streaming that turned out to be unprofitable. Contra the old saw, this orphan has a lot of fathers and mothers.
My particular beef has been with the writing, though it’s hard to know whether the blame lies more with the writers, or with the system, or with execs placing burdens on writers. But going forward, I have some observations and suggestions for Hollywood DEI and Disney more broadly:
1) No more gender-swapping existing characters – create original characters. Ripley, Sarah Connor, Atomic Blond, Trinity, Wanda, the Imperator Furiosa: a short list of strong female action heroes no one had an issue with because they were not gender-swapped, they were original, and well-written.
2) Half the population are women, if women GAF about The Marvels, it wouldn’t have landed like a sack of dead fish. Maybe do some market research? See whether any significant percentage of women care about Captain Marvel like, before spending 250 million? Why would you assume women want to watch altered versions of what men want to watch? Do you greenlight RomComs for a male audience? Are we going to get a Real Husbands of Beverly Hills show? You can go on pretending men and women have the same tastes, but facts disagree.
3) Entropy is a thing. Systems become disorganized, and the more complex the system the more vulnerable it can be. Nothing lasts forever. In the case of Star Wars it’s a big galaxy, why the fuck is there only one family involved in every story? In the case of Marvel, you cannot interlace stories across an endless number of shows/features without a sort of deadweight loss eating your story.
4) No, it’s not about the brand, it’s about story and character. (Duh!) Disney fell for the illusion that Marvel was invulnerable because it was Marvel. No, Marvel did very well because they had Iron Man and Captain America. Both are well-drawn characters with wide appeal. Hawkeye? Not so much. A TV show about Hawkeye that makes Hawkeye even less interesting, then swaps him out for Kate Bishop, about whom no one has ever GAF? They had characters: Cap, Iron Man, and they had a story: the Avengers/Thanos saga. Now no more Cap, no more Iron Man, no more Avengers story, guess what? The money-printing machine is broken and Ant Man ain’t gonna fix it.
5) Any competent writer/author who has ever worked in the spec fiction space could have told them: no fucking multiverses, you amateurs. How can we pump out still more shitty content? Multiverse! It works barely in the tiny, niche comic space, but in mass entertainment it’s a jeopardy-killer, a destroyer of stakes.
6) The way to write a strong female character is not by pairing her with a weak male character. This should not require explanation, like multiverses, it’s stupid, it’s amateur, it’s writers who’ve been in the system dealing with manipulation of other people’s original ideas without ever learning how to world build or create fully-formed characters on their own. This approach is internalized sexism. Inexplicably dumb.
7) Stop thinking you can fix stories in post. I mean, Jesus Christ, even if you just want to burn money, it does not work. It will never work because a story is an organic thing and rejiggering it in post just gives you Frankenstein’s monster.
8) Enough with light shows. Dazzling audiences with computerized whizbang has grown tired. Very tired. See also: the Volume. We can see the green screen. We can see the ones and zeroes. We know that’s just Mark Ruffalo in a green fat suit yelling at a green screen while hanging from a wire. The illusion no longer fools us.
No more gender-swapping existing characters – create original characters. Ripley, Sarah Connor, Atomic Blond, Trinity, Wanda, the Imperator Furiosa: a short list of strong female action heroes no one had an issue with because they were not gender-swapped, they were original, and well-written.
As a sometime author of magical/sci-fi gender swap fiction, I find much of the writing by others writing that fiction to be deplorable. My characters are weak sometimes, strong sometimes, some weak become strong with the passage of time. Misogyny is something I try avoiding but I have probably failed a few times. Like my horrid semi-erotic tale involving a cheating spouse. Would you believe I’ve sold over a hundred copies of that piece of crap.
Other authors of gender swap fiction I find to be horribly misogynistic for the most part and that’s why I stay away from reading every offering of theirs. Bimbos, sissies, and other dreadful characterizations of women in their stories, which is mostly erotica is the norm for them. I don’t have personal contact with these authors so I have no idea if they have a market for their work. I’ve found one with as I said before with mostly strong characters. Like one of mine who was the solo survivor of a plane crash in an isolated area who had to make their way home and faced dangerous challenges on the way.
Its been done in mainstream American television shows like Star Trek, The Munsters, Gilligan’s Island, Turnabout, and The Flintstones to name five.
There was a Broadway play, movie, and failed television pilot with portrayals done respectively by Lauren Bacall, Debbie Reynolds, and Suzanne Sommers who all played the title character in their versions of ‘Goodbye Charlie’
Gender swapping is done a great deal on Japanese television, usually involving teens, but which I haven’t watched much at all because I don’t speak Japanese.
Most of the stuff I mention above was silly or stupid or both. We’ll give Gilligan’s Island and The Munsters a break because those programs were almost always silly but what about ST’s episode Turnabout Intruder? It may have worked better if it had been Kirk or another Enterprise character having a nightmare.
I totally forgot. All the nearby bars and restaurants would sell parking and they all shared a shuttle bus service. Get liquored up then hit the fair!
Here was a very common scenario. Dad drives up near the entrance gate. Mom and kiddos disembark. Stay right here; I’ll be back in ten minutes. Yeah, right! Mom and kiddos mill about for a half hour. Mom reapplies sunscreen to the ankle biters again. The kids are bored and cranky. One of them starts crying. Dad arrives 40 minutes later hot and sweaty and in a foul mood. (It happens in late August.) Today is going to be great!
The entrance to the Minnesota State Fair kinda looks like a refugee camp. There are parts of families and couples, friend groups, scattered everywhere around the gates waiting for the driver to show up after finding someplace to park and hoofing it back.
You could write a play with that. No Exit. No Entrance.
5) Any competent writer/author who has ever worked in the spec fiction space could have told them: no fucking multiverses, you amateurs. How can we pump out still more shitty content? Multiverse! It works barely in the tiny, niche comic space, but in mass entertainment it’s a jeopardy-killer, a destroyer of stakes.
Spider-Man: Across The Spider-Verse begs to differ.
Kids love that shit and are excited about Spider-Gwen, Spider-Punk, etc. like most things, it can be done well or badly.
With the exception of the Camp David accords, most of the Carter presidency was a train wreck.
The country would be far better off today with another term of Carter’s “train wreck” than with Reagan’s disastrous tax cuts for the rich and trickle down nonsense, mismanagement of the AIDS crisis, and decisions that laid the foundation for the current homelessness crisis. Not to mention his crappy Federalist Society judges.
I think of this as the artistic equivalent of thinking you can write software, then add cybersecurity. Sorry, no — your vulnerabilities are already baked in and the easiest, cheapest way to fix them is to throw it all out and start over.
@Kathy: Sure. Ted Cruz, Ron deSantis, Chris Christie, Tucker, Sean Hannity, Bill O’Reilly. Lots of people. But it all depends on the makeup of Congress either way. WeThePeople have done pretty well at paralyzing government when we wanted to most of my life. We even succeed when we might rather not.
I’m struggling to think of any examples in Disney’s Marvel stuff. There are legacy characters who are women, but I can’t place anyone who was male in the source material becoming female for the movies.
Oh, Tilda Swinton as The Ancient One in Dr. Strange. But she was the best part of the movie, and if you can cast Tilda Swinton, you should cast Tilda Swinton, that’s just an immutable fact.
(Her, Judi Dench and Helen Mirren should be given first chance at any role, anywhere)
Are there others that I am blanking on? Are you under the impression that Nick Fury was Nicole Fury? Or that She-Hulk was originally a guy?
(Tilda Swinton would have made an amazing Dr. Strange, or Iron Man. Captain America might have been a stretch — “the Supersoldier Serum turned Steve Roger’s into … this”)
Across the Spiderverse was the second best movie I’ve seen all years and was an artistic, commercial, and fannish success despite breaking most of these rules.
Everything, Everywhere, All at Once, the best movie I saw last year broke most of them too, and again was an artistic and commercial success.
@Gustopher: Across the Spider-verse isn’t really a movie per se (I watched it on the trip to Korea). It’s more fan service. I’ve got no particular objection to fan service. Fans deserve service as much as anybody else, but I will agree with voice crying in the wilderness (whose post I skipped this time) about it not being a good way to expand the market in any particular genre of entertainment. If all they need to do is keep da fanboiz, they should do it and stop complaining. If they need to do more, it’s not a good road.
On the other hand, it’s possible that I’ll watch She Hulk/Andor/The Mandalorian/whatever when it comes to Tubi in a decade or so. I did that with Babylon 5 and may even stay through the end of season 4, who knows.
There is a tiny little smidgen of Minnesota in what should be rightfully Canada. That little tiny bump on that smooth border. The lil dealie that pops up north.
Rightfully called the Northwest Angle. Aka The Angle. It is the result of a cartographic error. The map maker drew the Lake Of The Woods incorrectly. The 49th latitude border established by treaty has one slight wobble.
The only way to get there and not enter Canada is by boat. I went once cuz why not. We were staying outside of Ely and fishing got boring after a few days. I looked at the map and thought why not. I proposed it to the group. About half said yes, so we went.
I’m a catch and release guy. Don’t even do that anymore. I realized I was severely traumatizing an innocent and puncturing it’s face with a nasty hook for a momentary thrill.
My job on the boat was DJing and fetching beers and chucking them softly. I am a pretty good DJ – I can read the room. I have never once chucked a beer overboard. The point of fishing is pointless hanging out.
The Angle is mostly owned by the Ojibwa. There is a tiny hamlet on the south shore. A bar. We had two beers.
Avengers: Infinity War was the biggest movie of the 2010’s. Both in box office and cultural impact.
Multiverses do fine for a general audience if told well.
Shoot a good story well told and you will find an audience.
My favorite bit from Everything Everywhere was the rock planet. Sentient rocks with googly eyes having a sincere heart to heart talk. Meaningful googly eyed looks. Well, second favorite bit after the butt plug stuff.
Yep, you can have one-offs like Spidey Multi or EEAAO, but multiverses will still fail. Thought experiment: Jesus in the Multiverse. There’s crucified Jesus and Jesus who moves to Florida and Jesus who joins the circus. Or Ahab. Ahab who hates the white whale, Ahab who loves the white whale, Ahab who never survived his first run-in with the white whale, Ahab who who actually hates black whales, Ahab who opens a gift shop on Nantucket.
Multiverses are a gimmick, occasionally used to good effect, much like time travel, but mostly just as a way to pump out more lazy content. You won’t see a sequel to EEAAO, and I suspect even Marvel has figured out that multiverses are destructive.
@Just nutha ignint cracker: She Hulk/Andor/The Mandalorian
Of those: Andor. Not perfect, but pretty damn good. An example of universe expansion that Star Wars should have started on 20 years ago. No need for a plush toy.
@Just nutha ignint cracker: ” Across the Spider-verse isn’t really a movie per se (I watched it on the trip to Korea). It’s more fan service.”
Honestly, I have no idea what you mean by this. It’s got a story — a character overcoming obstacles in pursuit of a goal — and that’s got nothing to do with fan service. And frankly, I haven’t been a comics “fan” since the late 70s, have never seen most of the Spider-iterations here, and was completely wrapped up in the story and its insane storytelling.
“I will agree with voice crying in the wilderness (whose post I skipped this time) about it not being a good way to expand the market in any particular genre of entertainment.”
We can quibble about aesthetics, but this is objectively wrong. Into the Spider-Verse was a big hit, but sequel Across was much, much bigger — in fact, it matches the original’s world-wide gross in its first 12 days of release and ended up basically doubling it. So in fact it’s exactly a good way to expand the market…
Across the Spider-verse isn’t really a movie per se (I watched it on the trip to Korea). It’s more fan service. I’ve got no particular objection to fan service.
I’m going to disagree here.
The Spider-Verse movies have taken an iconic figure that everyone knows, then centered around a reasonably well known variant (Miles is no Peter Parker, but he’s known) with a similar backstory, and then used the multiverse to tell a story that ultimately pokes at the edges of the original character (who isn’t even in the movie) to show us what makes him tick.
For each person who is excited to see Spider-Ham because they’ve been waiting to see Spider-Ham on the big screen for decades, there are countless more being exposed to the character for the first time and being delighted that a Porky-Pig-Spider-Man exists, and that the Spider-Man archetype is flexible enough to incorporate it.
It’s character-based and it works.
(In the 1990s, writer Alan Moore did a run on the Supreme comic book (which was just a terrible Superman knock off before that) and did something very similar with Superman-in-all-but-name telling a story that’s ultimately about the history of comic books. I think Superman and Spider-Man are some of the very few characters this would work for, as the only character more universally known than them is Jesus, but people tend to get violently angry when different versions of him show up)
Meanwhile, the MCU stuff uses a multiverse as just a plot thing, and a setting for action sequences, and it doesn’t really work. They’re not doing anything with it that couldn’t be a different McGuffin.
(And at some point, I’ll get around to watching Everything, Everywhere, All At Once but I balk at the runtime, which seemed very long if I remember correctly.)
As regards She Hulk, it appears to be a super-hero property made by, and made for, people who hate superheroes. In fact, She Hulk explicitly rejects heroism and just wants to continue her life as a high-powered LA Attorney. Make no mistake, actress Tatiana Maslany is funny. She is very funny. And the show appears to me to mock the very idea of heroism as, I don’t know, old fashioned?, not hip enough?, oppressive? Yes, it’s parody, and She Hulk is famous for frame-breaking rampages, and this series did not disappoint – but that’s not the part I’m talking about. Everything else about the show seemed phoned in, particularly the villain who was a half-baked broad stereotype.
Did not like. I think it’s likely that the shows creators celebrate the fact that guys like me didn’t like it. They are entitled, but it doesn’t seem a great way to make money.
@gVOR10: Because Star Wars is mostly the story of one family. It just happens to be set in a big universe.
If you get away from the movies, more of the universe is explored, but the movies are about a son “redeeming” his deadbeat dad, and then making the a lot of the same mistakes his dad made while he had his nephew over at summer camp, fucking up that kid. (With a side story about another kid with an absentee dad)
Star Wars: where the best thing parents can do for their kid is abandon them.
On a more general note, I think that the public just is a lot less interested in going to theaters these days. And a lot less interested in doing something on somebody else’s schedule.
I have watched the Marvel properties assiduously and I think that there is a big payoff possible for the multiverse plot.
But let’s look at the third Guardians of the Galaxy film. We did NOT get Starlord and Gamora back together – if they had, that would have been the quick-fix “multiverse fix everything” answer. But no, instead there was a sort of “we’ll always have Paris” (The actual quote was, “I think we probably did have a lot of fun together”) vibe to their parting. Bittersweet closure. Very nice.
No, Feige has something quite specific in mind for the multiverse and for Kang. Of course, now that Jonathon Majors has got himself in hot water, it’s hard to say where that’s going.
@Jay L Gischer: It was an absolutely perfect adaptation of the Dan Slott run on the comic book. The main character’s POV sets the tone for how everyone else is portrayed, and she’s not big into superhero stuff.
It was also very much a reaction to the comics of that period being super serious and trying to make everything super weighty and angsty.
Perfect adaptation. Whether adapting that was a good idea or not…
The MCU is brighter and sillier than early 2000s comics, so it’s weird to have this type of show reacting to it. If it was Wonder Girl, Attorney At Law set against the Snyder movies, it might have been closer to the original comics.
It (that odd little bump of MN into Canada) is the result of a cartographic error.
It’s been a long time since I read the book, but a publishing house commissioned, perhaps for the bicentennial, a series of local historians to do histories of the individual states. For Michigan, it was Bruce Catton, a highly readable book.
Why is the Upper Peninsula part of MI rather than WI? There was some uncertainty about the location of the OH/MI border. Some maps and legislation said it was a line east from the southern tip of Lake Michigan, at a time it hadn’t been accurately surveyed. MI was granted the UP in return for ceding Toledo to OH. Not a great prize as the UP was regarded as a useless wilderness. Copper was found, and the mine sites stolen from the indians, just in time to cast brass cannons for the Union. IIRC there was pressure to reach an agreement, as statehood was being held up and the Federal government had accumulated a considerable budget surplus that was to be distributed to the states, not to territories.
Today is Trans Day of Remembrance. Part of me really hates this day. I am constantly reminded that I can be killed for the crime of not being cis. I don’t have to wonder about being kicked out of my family, I was.
But this year, and every year, I remember Gwen Araujo. Gwen is the sister I never had. She was braver than I ever was. She knew who she was and lived, while I cowered in the closet. I wonder what her life would have been had she not been murdered.
Her death affected me greatly. She was the first trans person I saw being murdered for who she was. She was 17 at the time, I was 22. It would take me almost 18 more years before I could transition, longer than she was alive.
So, Gwen and all our siblings who never were, I remember you.
@Michael Reynolds: I’m just mentioning the only Dizzy plus names I can remember. I cancelled Hulu when I realized WWE was the only thing I watched there, so I don’t keep up much.
The country would be far better off today with another term of Carter’s “train wreck” than with Reagan’s disastrous tax cuts for the rich and trickle down nonsense, mismanagement of the AIDS crisis, and decisions that laid the foundation for the current homelessness crisis. Not to mention his crappy Federalist Society judges.
If all you say is true, why did such a terrible President carry 49 of 50 states at 1984 election time? If all you say is true, why did it not cause his VP to lose in 1988?
@Bill Jempty: I dunno. Why did a supermajority of white men vote for pervert, traitor, liar, and incompetent buffoon Trump over Hillary and Biden? Stupidity? Gullibility? Amorality? Lack of patriotism?
I don’t know why so many Americans keep falling for Republican lies and propaganda. I don’t know why so many people insist on voting for the bad over the good. I don’t know why people continue to vote for tax cuts for billionaires, book banning, and anti-abortion extremism.
So you’ll have to ask the people who vote for rightwing bigotry and failure to explain why they do so. I prefer to vote for decency, progress, and competence — so I wouldn’t know.
Up in the Great White North, Quebec City. Spent just the one night in the old city. Elegance, delicious food, and style of France with the welcoming of Canada.
There is a photo of Rosalyn Carter with Jimmy in profile. She is basically dead center facing the photographer. Jimmy is in profile whispering in her ear and she is trying and basically failing to stifle a giggle.
It is such a sweet, endearing photo of a bonded pair.
Imagine a world where Carter wins a second term. I was 17. Couldn’t vote.
@MarkedMan:
Hope you have a grand time!
I spent a bit of time in Francophone Canada, mostly in Montreal. In my mid 20’s I briefly lived in Burlington. Good town, kinda boring. I wasn’t even there long enough to get a Vermont driver’s license. We would do weekend jaunts up to Montreal. Border control back then was pretty casual. What is the purpose of your trip? Dicking around, mostly. Have a nice visit!
I semi spoke French – four semesters in college were not totally wasted – so I was the front guy, the talker, in most situations. Speak simple declarative sentences slowly, and I catch 40% of that.
I have heard Quebec is gorgeous. Have a fantastic trip!
I have to been to Thunder Bay and environs, Winnipeg, Montreal, Banff, PEI.
Did a rail trip from Thunder Bay to Banff and back on the Canadian version of Amtrak in the cheapest roomette accommodation available that didn’t have a room-mate. I am prone to anxiety and need private down-time to decompress.
@de stijl: I remember having to fly to Canada in the ’90s on the spur of a moment request from a client. Not knowing what the actual requirements were, I grabbed my then-expired passport, which I sheepishly presented to Canadian immigration control wondering if I would be turned back. I learned “expired US passport” was literally on the list of acceptable identification. Probably not anymore.
Of course in the early ’80s, I used to drive across southern Ontario on my way from Illlinois to Massachusetts. If there was even a crossing gate at either end of that, I don’t remember it.
I haven’t been to Canada since I was nine years old or August 1970. Why we went to Quebec still puzzles me except for maybe my parents wanted to take us children somewhere other than Florida or Columbus Ohio*.
One thing that supposedly happened in Quebec was this.
My mother and father would often have a glass of wine with dinner. We were at a restaurant and my parents ordered it.
After taking the order the waiter said something like ‘What will the children be having?’
Dad replied ‘Our children** can’t have wine.’
‘Monsieur, you are not in Pennsylvania***.
Another happening was Dad being challenged to a drag race with all of us in the family’s 1967 Pontiac Bonneville****. Dad accepted the challenge and beat the other car away from the traffic light two times. At a third light, the driver surrendered.
Since I was nine at the time, I’m not totally sure if these aren’t family urban legends.
*- Due to my father owning race horses, we went to the Ohio State Fair like 3 or 4 times between 1967 and the very early 70’s. Harness racing took place at the fair and the driver/trainer Dad was most associated with- Bruce Nickells- had horses there.
**- On that trip were me, my 7 yo brother, brothers 12 and 13, my sister who was 17 and one of her close friends of the same age.
***- The drinking age in most of the United States was 18 at the time. Pennsylvania was 21.
****- Pontiac Bonnevilles supposedly had great engines in them.
New York Times reporter Maggie Haberman says that there’s a real effort underway to convince Trump to choose Tucker Carlson as his running mate.
Somehow I doubt it. Carlson’s a celebrity is his own right, with a huge fan base, and he’s younger and better-looking than Trump. That’s too much competition for the spotlight. Trump always has to be the star.
@de stijl:
Let’s forget nostalgia.
With the exception of the Camp David accords, most of the Carter presidency was a train wreck. He had strong opposition in the democratic primaries so he took what was called at the time as ‘the rose garden’ strategy, don’t forget he approved the awful Operation Eagle Claw to rescue the hostages in Iran and not surprisingly was a complete debacle. Throw in high inflation and unemployment, it should come as no surprise American voters threw him out in November 1980. His defeat ranks with Herbert Hoover’s 1932 loss as the worst in American history for an incumbent President.
I remember Bob Hope or somebody else singing in regards to Carter
Thanks for the memories
Of Begin and Sadat
Hamilton and his pot
Billy drinking beer in the parking lot. Thanks so much.
BTW I was 19 at the time and I voted for John Anderson.
Oh I almost forgot Carter’s purge of cabinet members in the summer of 1979, and Democrat Congressman Charlie Wilson’s quote in the aftermath.
“Good grief! He’s cut down the tall trees and left the monkeys.”
@Bill Jempty: That does not surprise me at all…when we lived in Germany when I was a teen, waiters were happy to serve me a glass of wine when I went out to dinner with my parents (I was ages 13-15 while we were there). When we went to France, we saw kids as young as 6 or 7 with glasses of wine cut with water–generally speaking, you could tell the ages of the kids by how diluted (or not) their wine was with dinner.
@Bill Jempty:
I used to live a little bit over a mile from the Minnesota State Fairgrounds nestled in a really boring neighborhood in northern St. Paul. People would park on my street and walk there. Is Falcon Heights a neighborhood designation or a tiny inner suburb? Not sure.
Unless you got there before 8, 8:30 all the lots at the fairgrounds were full up. Folks would drive up and down nearby streets looking for a curb parking spot. Good freaking luck with that!
There should have been more parking. Multi-story garages. Underground. But the state fair only happens once a year. It would be inefficient to build more parking.
The brilliant, seat of the pants, unplanned, efficient solution was that homeowners who lived nearby would rent out their yards as parking lots. You can cram a crap ton of cars onto a residential yard. It was like Tetris the way they arranged it.
The organic solution. Folks would develop a parasocial relationship. I always park at Jenny’s – she’s the best.
In a lot of states the state fair is no big deal, who cares? In Minnesota, Iowa, Texas it’s a big freaking deal. Daily attendance is 100000 plus on weekdays and 250000 or more on weekends. It goes on for 12 days.
If you are a nearby homeowner who rents out yard parking space you can make 10 grand easy in green cash the IRS doesn’t need to know about. Some folks hire out a day worker to manage the whole shebang.
Living nearby is a massive pain in the ass.
Pro-tip: go really early or after 7pm.
@CSK: Doesn’t mean the MAGAts wouldn’t like to see it, though. But yeah, the MAGAt-in-chief is not likely to agree.
Odds and ends.
I got a flu shot, finally. I may be having a reaction to it, which would be a first for this type of vaccine. So far it’s only a little discomfort on the arm, not bad enough to call it even a minor ache.
Threads accessed on a PC browser now lets you set up without downloading the app to your phone. So, it still mines data, but not as insidiously.
Benito needs to pick a vp who’s so bad and capable, not even his worst enemies would think of assassinating him because it would put the vp in charge. Any suggestions?
@Joe:
Before 9-11 we visited my brother in northern Minnesota. At one point we decided, since it was only a couple miles out of our way on a county road, we’d drive into Canada just so my wife could say she’d been there. It was evening, we were concerned the crossing might be closed. And we weren’t sure how they’d react to, “Our business? We’re just going to drive around the block and leave.” As it turned out there was no one in the guard shack and the gate was open.
@Bill Jempty: One, John. B. Anderson had been my congressman for years. Saying he was retiring from Congress because he was tired of pandering to his right wing supporters (Rockford IL was for some reason a hotbed of Birchers) didn’t erase his two decades of pandering to them. Two, you’d have preferred Gerald Ford?
O Canada
One summer morning in 1969, pre Amtrak, a friend and I boarded the Illinois Central passenger train in Carbondale, Illinois northbound to Chicago 309 miles*. We changed trains in Chicago and boarded a train to Detroit 283 miles. We took a bus that went in a tunnel through the Detroit River to Windsor, Canada. At that time no US Passport was required to enter Canada. I do remember presenting my Illinois Drivers License which in those days was a piece of paper a bit larger than a business card with no photograph. We exchanged currency and made our way to the local Canadian passenger rail station. From Windsor we rode to Toronto 231 miles (372 km, thank you Google Maps) and changed to a train bound for Montreal 336 miles (542 km). In Montreal we caught another train to Québec City 167 miles (269 km). During the run between Windsor and Toronto the train crew spoke english. From Toronto to Montreal all announcements were made in both English and French. English was dropped between Montreal and Québec City and my friend who was fluent in French had to tell me everything the train crew was saying. Don’t remember the exact timetable but I do know that there was an overnight stretch. We road coach for the whole 2650+ mile round trip and I think that I got a few hours of sleep at night each way. In Québec City we found an old Hotel inside the walled city. The only person who spoke English to us the entire visit was the fellow who checked us in. The two days we spent walking around Québec City went all too fast. One thing I learned right away was that there was no way that I could order black coffee. It seemed to be available with cream only.
When in Québec City do as they do. Or something like that.
*Rail miles are from today’s railroad timetables in USA and Canada or highway miles if I can’t find the RR miles. I know it was the IC between Carbondale and Chicago but can’t remember names of the other railroads. No map that I can find shows a passenger RR connection between Chicago and Detroit in 1969. The route would have had to go through Indiana so there’s no telling which line we took.
WikiP tells me that Via Rail was established in 1977 in Canada so we likely traveled Canadian National or Canadian Pacific passenger service.
@Kathy:
Andy Dick
Dane Cook
Tom Cruise
Kathy Griffin
Kevin Sorbo
Awkwafina
Stephen Dorff
Sean Hannity
Kanye West
Kirk Cameron
Jake Paul
Ana Navarro
Stephen Dorff might be a lovely man in real life but his ott acting choices make me want to punch him. There is German compound word I can never remember… backpfeifengesicht. A face in need of a fist. (Ty Google!)
The Trump veepstakes will be interesting. My prediction is that it won’t be a politician, but a past their prime fading but not entirely forgotten non-toxic celebrity type. Trump does not now need to buff up his bona fides with a steady hand R politician as a back-up. We are way, way past that point. Likely R voters do not care about that stuff at all.
Let’s use Fabio as a temporary stand-in. He’s ineligible, but is of the type and nature I’m alluding to. A fading celebrity who is willing to be submissive to him for gain. Trump no longer needs a guy like Pence to buff his credentials. He’s fully branded now; we know exactly what we are going to get.
Kevin Sorbo might not be a bad call, but a woman and/or a minority might win the focus group.
For those following the Disney slash woke saga, I’m afraid the anti-wokists (word?) have won. The trades now acknowledge that ham-fisted DEI has done serious damage to Marvel and Star Wars. Even someone like Grace Randolph – sworn enemy of the Nerdrotic camp – has admitted the narrative is baked and ready to slice.
In reality of course DEI is only one factor, but it’s silly to pretend it’s not a factor at all, or to blame it all on misogynist trolls. The factors include market saturation – too much product, not enough art – and superhero fatigue, and godawful writing and a headlong rush into streaming that turned out to be unprofitable. Contra the old saw, this orphan has a lot of fathers and mothers.
My particular beef has been with the writing, though it’s hard to know whether the blame lies more with the writers, or with the system, or with execs placing burdens on writers. But going forward, I have some observations and suggestions for Hollywood DEI and Disney more broadly:
1) No more gender-swapping existing characters – create original characters. Ripley, Sarah Connor, Atomic Blond, Trinity, Wanda, the Imperator Furiosa: a short list of strong female action heroes no one had an issue with because they were not gender-swapped, they were original, and well-written.
2) Half the population are women, if women GAF about The Marvels, it wouldn’t have landed like a sack of dead fish. Maybe do some market research? See whether any significant percentage of women care about Captain Marvel like, before spending 250 million? Why would you assume women want to watch altered versions of what men want to watch? Do you greenlight RomComs for a male audience? Are we going to get a Real Husbands of Beverly Hills show? You can go on pretending men and women have the same tastes, but facts disagree.
3) Entropy is a thing. Systems become disorganized, and the more complex the system the more vulnerable it can be. Nothing lasts forever. In the case of Star Wars it’s a big galaxy, why the fuck is there only one family involved in every story? In the case of Marvel, you cannot interlace stories across an endless number of shows/features without a sort of deadweight loss eating your story.
4) No, it’s not about the brand, it’s about story and character. (Duh!) Disney fell for the illusion that Marvel was invulnerable because it was Marvel. No, Marvel did very well because they had Iron Man and Captain America. Both are well-drawn characters with wide appeal. Hawkeye? Not so much. A TV show about Hawkeye that makes Hawkeye even less interesting, then swaps him out for Kate Bishop, about whom no one has ever GAF? They had characters: Cap, Iron Man, and they had a story: the Avengers/Thanos saga. Now no more Cap, no more Iron Man, no more Avengers story, guess what? The money-printing machine is broken and Ant Man ain’t gonna fix it.
5) Any competent writer/author who has ever worked in the spec fiction space could have told them: no fucking multiverses, you amateurs. How can we pump out still more shitty content? Multiverse! It works barely in the tiny, niche comic space, but in mass entertainment it’s a jeopardy-killer, a destroyer of stakes.
6) The way to write a strong female character is not by pairing her with a weak male character. This should not require explanation, like multiverses, it’s stupid, it’s amateur, it’s writers who’ve been in the system dealing with manipulation of other people’s original ideas without ever learning how to world build or create fully-formed characters on their own. This approach is internalized sexism. Inexplicably dumb.
7) Stop thinking you can fix stories in post. I mean, Jesus Christ, even if you just want to burn money, it does not work. It will never work because a story is an organic thing and rejiggering it in post just gives you Frankenstein’s monster.
8) Enough with light shows. Dazzling audiences with computerized whizbang has grown tired. Very tired. See also: the Volume. We can see the green screen. We can see the ones and zeroes. We know that’s just Mark Ruffalo in a green fat suit yelling at a green screen while hanging from a wire. The illusion no longer fools us.
There’s more, but that’s enough.
@Michael Reynolds:
As a sometime author of magical/sci-fi gender swap fiction, I find much of the writing by others writing that fiction to be deplorable. My characters are weak sometimes, strong sometimes, some weak become strong with the passage of time. Misogyny is something I try avoiding but I have probably failed a few times. Like my horrid semi-erotic tale involving a cheating spouse. Would you believe I’ve sold over a hundred copies of that piece of crap.
Other authors of gender swap fiction I find to be horribly misogynistic for the most part and that’s why I stay away from reading every offering of theirs. Bimbos, sissies, and other dreadful characterizations of women in their stories, which is mostly erotica is the norm for them. I don’t have personal contact with these authors so I have no idea if they have a market for their work. I’ve found one with as I said before with mostly strong characters. Like one of mine who was the solo survivor of a plane crash in an isolated area who had to make their way home and faced dangerous challenges on the way.
@Michael Reynolds:
Its been done in mainstream American television shows like Star Trek, The Munsters, Gilligan’s Island, Turnabout, and The Flintstones to name five.
There was a Broadway play, movie, and failed television pilot with portrayals done respectively by Lauren Bacall, Debbie Reynolds, and Suzanne Sommers who all played the title character in their versions of ‘Goodbye Charlie’
Gender swapping is done a great deal on Japanese television, usually involving teens, but which I haven’t watched much at all because I don’t speak Japanese.
Most of the stuff I mention above was silly or stupid or both. We’ll give Gilligan’s Island and The Munsters a break because those programs were almost always silly but what about ST’s episode Turnabout Intruder? It may have worked better if it had been Kirk or another Enterprise character having a nightmare.
@de stijl:
I totally forgot. All the nearby bars and restaurants would sell parking and they all shared a shuttle bus service. Get liquored up then hit the fair!
Here was a very common scenario. Dad drives up near the entrance gate. Mom and kiddos disembark. Stay right here; I’ll be back in ten minutes. Yeah, right! Mom and kiddos mill about for a half hour. Mom reapplies sunscreen to the ankle biters again. The kids are bored and cranky. One of them starts crying. Dad arrives 40 minutes later hot and sweaty and in a foul mood. (It happens in late August.) Today is going to be great!
The entrance to the Minnesota State Fair kinda looks like a refugee camp. There are parts of families and couples, friend groups, scattered everywhere around the gates waiting for the driver to show up after finding someplace to park and hoofing it back.
You could write a play with that. No Exit. No Entrance.
@Michael Reynolds:
Spider-Man: Across The Spider-Verse begs to differ.
Kids love that shit and are excited about Spider-Gwen, Spider-Punk, etc. like most things, it can be done well or badly.
@Bill Jempty:
The country would be far better off today with another term of Carter’s “train wreck” than with Reagan’s disastrous tax cuts for the rich and trickle down nonsense, mismanagement of the AIDS crisis, and decisions that laid the foundation for the current homelessness crisis. Not to mention his crappy Federalist Society judges.
@Michael Reynolds:
I think of this as the artistic equivalent of thinking you can write software, then add cybersecurity. Sorry, no — your vulnerabilities are already baked in and the easiest, cheapest way to fix them is to throw it all out and start over.
@Kathy: Sure. Ted Cruz, Ron deSantis, Chris Christie, Tucker, Sean Hannity, Bill O’Reilly. Lots of people. But it all depends on the makeup of Congress either way. WeThePeople have done pretty well at paralyzing government when we wanted to most of my life. We even succeed when we might rather not.
@Michael Reynolds:
I’m struggling to think of any examples in Disney’s Marvel stuff. There are legacy characters who are women, but I can’t place anyone who was male in the source material becoming female for the movies.
Oh, Tilda Swinton as The Ancient One in Dr. Strange. But she was the best part of the movie, and if you can cast Tilda Swinton, you should cast Tilda Swinton, that’s just an immutable fact.
(Her, Judi Dench and Helen Mirren should be given first chance at any role, anywhere)
Are there others that I am blanking on? Are you under the impression that Nick Fury was Nicole Fury? Or that She-Hulk was originally a guy?
(Tilda Swinton would have made an amazing Dr. Strange, or Iron Man. Captain America might have been a stretch — “the Supersoldier Serum turned Steve Roger’s into … this”)
@Michael Reynolds:
Across the Spiderverse was the second best movie I’ve seen all years and was an artistic, commercial, and fannish success despite breaking most of these rules.
Everything, Everywhere, All at Once, the best movie I saw last year broke most of them too, and again was an artistic and commercial success.
@Gustopher: Across the Spider-verse isn’t really a movie per se (I watched it on the trip to Korea). It’s more fan service. I’ve got no particular objection to fan service. Fans deserve service as much as anybody else, but I will agree with voice crying in the wilderness (whose post I skipped this time) about it not being a good way to expand the market in any particular genre of entertainment. If all they need to do is keep da fanboiz, they should do it and stop complaining. If they need to do more, it’s not a good road.
On the other hand, it’s possible that I’ll watch She Hulk/Andor/The Mandalorian/whatever when it comes to Tubi in a decade or so. I did that with Babylon 5 and may even stay through the end of season 4, who knows.
@gVOR10:
There is a tiny little smidgen of Minnesota in what should be rightfully Canada. That little tiny bump on that smooth border. The lil dealie that pops up north.
Rightfully called the Northwest Angle. Aka The Angle. It is the result of a cartographic error. The map maker drew the Lake Of The Woods incorrectly. The 49th latitude border established by treaty has one slight wobble.
The only way to get there and not enter Canada is by boat. I went once cuz why not. We were staying outside of Ely and fishing got boring after a few days. I looked at the map and thought why not. I proposed it to the group. About half said yes, so we went.
I’m a catch and release guy. Don’t even do that anymore. I realized I was severely traumatizing an innocent and puncturing it’s face with a nasty hook for a momentary thrill.
My job on the boat was DJing and fetching beers and chucking them softly. I am a pretty good DJ – I can read the room. I have never once chucked a beer overboard. The point of fishing is pointless hanging out.
The Angle is mostly owned by the Ojibwa. There is a tiny hamlet on the south shore. A bar. We had two beers.
I went there once out of boredom.
@Mister Bluster:..we road coach…
Correction: …we rode coach…
Good grief. That only took three hours and multiple proofs to catch.
@Stormy Dragon:
Avengers: Infinity War was the biggest movie of the 2010’s. Both in box office and cultural impact.
Multiverses do fine for a general audience if told well.
Shoot a good story well told and you will find an audience.
My favorite bit from Everything Everywhere was the rock planet. Sentient rocks with googly eyes having a sincere heart to heart talk. Meaningful googly eyed looks. Well, second favorite bit after the butt plug stuff.
@Gustopher:
Tilda Swinton has a superpower. She is incapable of giving a bad performance. She and Toni Colette share that.
Imagine being cast with one of those two already on board. How do you cope? It would be overwhelming pressure. Performance anxiety.
@Gustopher:
@Stormy Dragon:
Yep, you can have one-offs like Spidey Multi or EEAAO, but multiverses will still fail. Thought experiment: Jesus in the Multiverse. There’s crucified Jesus and Jesus who moves to Florida and Jesus who joins the circus. Or Ahab. Ahab who hates the white whale, Ahab who loves the white whale, Ahab who never survived his first run-in with the white whale, Ahab who who actually hates black whales, Ahab who opens a gift shop on Nantucket.
Multiverses are a gimmick, occasionally used to good effect, much like time travel, but mostly just as a way to pump out more lazy content. You won’t see a sequel to EEAAO, and I suspect even Marvel has figured out that multiverses are destructive.
@Michael Reynolds:
Thank you. I thought I was the only one bothered by that.
@Just nutha ignint cracker:
She Hulk/Andor/The Mandalorian
Of those: Andor. Not perfect, but pretty damn good. An example of universe expansion that Star Wars should have started on 20 years ago. No need for a plush toy.
@Just nutha ignint cracker: ” Across the Spider-verse isn’t really a movie per se (I watched it on the trip to Korea). It’s more fan service.”
Honestly, I have no idea what you mean by this. It’s got a story — a character overcoming obstacles in pursuit of a goal — and that’s got nothing to do with fan service. And frankly, I haven’t been a comics “fan” since the late 70s, have never seen most of the Spider-iterations here, and was completely wrapped up in the story and its insane storytelling.
“I will agree with voice crying in the wilderness (whose post I skipped this time) about it not being a good way to expand the market in any particular genre of entertainment.”
We can quibble about aesthetics, but this is objectively wrong. Into the Spider-Verse was a big hit, but sequel Across was much, much bigger — in fact, it matches the original’s world-wide gross in its first 12 days of release and ended up basically doubling it. So in fact it’s exactly a good way to expand the market…
@de stijl: “Tilda Swinton has a superpower. She is incapable of giving a bad performance. ”
I understand the thinking, but I won’t be convinced until she acts under George Lucas’ direction. He’s the guy who can make Samuel L. Jackson boring…
@Just nutha ignint cracker:
I’m going to disagree here.
The Spider-Verse movies have taken an iconic figure that everyone knows, then centered around a reasonably well known variant (Miles is no Peter Parker, but he’s known) with a similar backstory, and then used the multiverse to tell a story that ultimately pokes at the edges of the original character (who isn’t even in the movie) to show us what makes him tick.
For each person who is excited to see Spider-Ham because they’ve been waiting to see Spider-Ham on the big screen for decades, there are countless more being exposed to the character for the first time and being delighted that a Porky-Pig-Spider-Man exists, and that the Spider-Man archetype is flexible enough to incorporate it.
It’s character-based and it works.
(In the 1990s, writer Alan Moore did a run on the Supreme comic book (which was just a terrible Superman knock off before that) and did something very similar with Superman-in-all-but-name telling a story that’s ultimately about the history of comic books. I think Superman and Spider-Man are some of the very few characters this would work for, as the only character more universally known than them is Jesus, but people tend to get violently angry when different versions of him show up)
Meanwhile, the MCU stuff uses a multiverse as just a plot thing, and a setting for action sequences, and it doesn’t really work. They’re not doing anything with it that couldn’t be a different McGuffin.
(And at some point, I’ll get around to watching Everything, Everywhere, All At Once but I balk at the runtime, which seemed very long if I remember correctly.)
As regards She Hulk, it appears to be a super-hero property made by, and made for, people who hate superheroes. In fact, She Hulk explicitly rejects heroism and just wants to continue her life as a high-powered LA Attorney. Make no mistake, actress Tatiana Maslany is funny. She is very funny. And the show appears to me to mock the very idea of heroism as, I don’t know, old fashioned?, not hip enough?, oppressive? Yes, it’s parody, and She Hulk is famous for frame-breaking rampages, and this series did not disappoint – but that’s not the part I’m talking about. Everything else about the show seemed phoned in, particularly the villain who was a half-baked broad stereotype.
Did not like. I think it’s likely that the shows creators celebrate the fact that guys like me didn’t like it. They are entitled, but it doesn’t seem a great way to make money.
@gVOR10: Because Star Wars is mostly the story of one family. It just happens to be set in a big universe.
If you get away from the movies, more of the universe is explored, but the movies are about a son “redeeming” his deadbeat dad, and then making the a lot of the same mistakes his dad made while he had his nephew over at summer camp, fucking up that kid. (With a side story about another kid with an absentee dad)
Star Wars: where the best thing parents can do for their kid is abandon them.
On a more general note, I think that the public just is a lot less interested in going to theaters these days. And a lot less interested in doing something on somebody else’s schedule.
I have watched the Marvel properties assiduously and I think that there is a big payoff possible for the multiverse plot.
But let’s look at the third Guardians of the Galaxy film. We did NOT get Starlord and Gamora back together – if they had, that would have been the quick-fix “multiverse fix everything” answer. But no, instead there was a sort of “we’ll always have Paris” (The actual quote was, “I think we probably did have a lot of fun together”) vibe to their parting. Bittersweet closure. Very nice.
No, Feige has something quite specific in mind for the multiverse and for Kang. Of course, now that Jonathon Majors has got himself in hot water, it’s hard to say where that’s going.
@Jay L Gischer: It was an absolutely perfect adaptation of the Dan Slott run on the comic book. The main character’s POV sets the tone for how everyone else is portrayed, and she’s not big into superhero stuff.
It was also very much a reaction to the comics of that period being super serious and trying to make everything super weighty and angsty.
Perfect adaptation. Whether adapting that was a good idea or not…
The MCU is brighter and sillier than early 2000s comics, so it’s weird to have this type of show reacting to it. If it was Wonder Girl, Attorney At Law set against the Snyder movies, it might have been closer to the original comics.
@de stijl:
It’s been a long time since I read the book, but a publishing house commissioned, perhaps for the bicentennial, a series of local historians to do histories of the individual states. For Michigan, it was Bruce Catton, a highly readable book.
Why is the Upper Peninsula part of MI rather than WI? There was some uncertainty about the location of the OH/MI border. Some maps and legislation said it was a line east from the southern tip of Lake Michigan, at a time it hadn’t been accurately surveyed. MI was granted the UP in return for ceding Toledo to OH. Not a great prize as the UP was regarded as a useless wilderness. Copper was found, and the mine sites stolen from the indians, just in time to cast brass cannons for the Union. IIRC there was pressure to reach an agreement, as statehood was being held up and the Federal government had accumulated a considerable budget surplus that was to be distributed to the states, not to territories.
Today is Trans Day of Remembrance. Part of me really hates this day. I am constantly reminded that I can be killed for the crime of not being cis. I don’t have to wonder about being kicked out of my family, I was.
But this year, and every year, I remember Gwen Araujo. Gwen is the sister I never had. She was braver than I ever was. She knew who she was and lived, while I cowered in the closet. I wonder what her life would have been had she not been murdered.
Her death affected me greatly. She was the first trans person I saw being murdered for who she was. She was 17 at the time, I was 22. It would take me almost 18 more years before I could transition, longer than she was alive.
So, Gwen and all our siblings who never were, I remember you.
@Michael Reynolds: I’m just mentioning the only Dizzy plus names I can remember. I cancelled Hulu when I realized WWE was the only thing I watched there, so I don’t keep up much.
@wr: Okay. We differ on this point.
@Gustopher: Wow! You stayed in the comics market a LOT longer than I could afford to. I shoulda majored in STEM, I guess.
@Kathy:
Oh , thank Thanos, you’ve left Cracker and I off the list of potential suckers. Thanks large!!
@DK:
If all you say is true, why did such a terrible President carry 49 of 50 states at 1984 election time? If all you say is true, why did it not cause his VP to lose in 1988?
@Bill Jempty: I dunno. Why did a supermajority of white men vote for pervert, traitor, liar, and incompetent buffoon Trump over Hillary and Biden? Stupidity? Gullibility? Amorality? Lack of patriotism?
I don’t know why so many Americans keep falling for Republican lies and propaganda. I don’t know why so many people insist on voting for the bad over the good. I don’t know why people continue to vote for tax cuts for billionaires, book banning, and anti-abortion extremism.
So you’ll have to ask the people who vote for rightwing bigotry and failure to explain why they do so. I prefer to vote for decency, progress, and competence — so I wouldn’t know.