arc

Also, and this carries over from the last episode, I just can’t buy any kind of ticking bomb deadline for a crisis at the TVA. It sits outside of normal time, right? It shouldn’t matter how long Loki and Mobius stay in 1893 or any other point in normal time. The rules aren’t very clear about this and the way they can talk to B-15 does seem to imply that there is a 1:1 correspondence of time spent in the field to time passing in the TVA, but that makes very little sense. Honestly I’d be fine with the show being vague about the rules if they didn’t try to impose imminent doom in two places that don’t share the same time. At least back in the first episode the deadline for saving Loki from time slipping occurred entirely within the TVA.

Did Majors just decide that Timely should have a stutter in addition to being a before-his-time genius AND a con man? Or did the director keep telling him to do more acting? Every acting choice he made this episode felt showy and unnecessary, which I never felt watching him before. (though except for Ant-Man 3, I hadn't known about the abuse allegations with anything else I watched him in, and it certainly colors how I watch him now.) Anyways, he has always been an actor who makes a lot of big choices, but this was the first time where I felt like I could see him acting. Tremendously distracting. Every bit of this episode felt like it was spinning its wheels, even if Loki and Mobius went a little meta by lampshading it. The multiple stand-offs with Sylvie had a lot of shouting and it never made sense to me why she wouldn't believe that the TVA was crucial to keeping the multiverse alive, esp since she did at the end and it wasn't because anyone finally gave her a more convincing argument either. And the 1893 sets were good but somehow like 5% below great. I feel like the similar era "Warrior" show did it better, though to be fair their entire thing is set in the 1870s, while "Loki" time travels all over. I wonder if original formula He Who Remains was self-built or if he was also kick-started by a TVA manual from OB. So is Ravonna's big secret that she's a HWR variant too? Or is OB the real power behind the TVA? "He Who Remains" is a good name for someone who set up his throne at the "end of time", but Ouroboros is a good name for someone who's always been there, a truly self-created man.

I guess I interpreted it differently. He suspects he's in Jerry's brain due to Rick's fault, but the way he says it, it's as if he doesn't remember the Burger-and-Fries/Jerrick thing at all -- or, this is the Burger-and-Fries/Jerrick thing: "How did I get here? I suspect a chunk of Rick's brain got merged with a chunk of Jerry's." Whereas if he had been the key to preserving Rick and Jerry's individual minds, and then got stuck in Jerry's brain after all that, he would have been a lot clearer about how he got left there. Also, I feel like the show has used end tags to expand on various short gags hinted at earlier in an episode without meaning the tag comes chronologically after the events of the episode, but I don't actually remember enough to cite an example.

Memory Rick said he was in Jerry's brain, but I think he made a mistake based on incomplete information. I think the tag was a flashback to Memory Rick trapped in the Jerricky gestalt.

I only barely followed the idea of Rick's mind in Jerry's brain and vice-versa, but they very quickly moved on from it to a weird friendship of two Jerry-Rick merged entities, followed by Jerricky, which was horrifying. And I'm not sure why the crime boss could tell Jerricky had all the positive qualities of Jerry and Rick -- surely the two merged versions would have some of Jerry's self-sabotage and/or general incompetence. All that said, I was highly entertained throughout.

Being the direct target of many TVA murder attempts will probably create a permanent bias against the TVA.

The episode’s moments were strong, but I felt like they skipped way too much plot, going from fixing Loki’s time-slipping problem last episode to pursuing X-5* in 1977 because he’s their lead to Sylvie. And BTW why is that important to Mobius and B-15? I continue to love the costuming of the TVA. It’s mostly classic (1950s?) but with weird extra details that show they’re clearly not from any real-world era. * how can it be that an agency that looks after an entire universe and multiverse and is clearly shown to be bigger than Manhattan has so few hunters that all the ones we’ve seen have such short designations? Do agents like Xcdef-847293737272 only get assigned to remote corners of the sacred timeline?

I love time shenanigans, so the conversation happening in two time periods was awesome. They also did a good job using little details like glasses or Mobius' idle dust-graffiti to help signpost which era was which. Also, this show's Modern(ish) art direction in the whole design of the TVA is sublime. I love it so much. The 1982 McDonalds was great too. Overall, Loki the show is one of the least directly adapted from any comics runs, right? S1 was a great story and I'm excited for S2 too.

... correction, "NOT let Joshua enact his "standby, not off" plan."

+ great vibes + incredible production value, esp for an $80M film. A couple of slightly bad CGI moments but overall it looked great + interesting world building - but it doesn't fully hang together. In some ways the Americans are full on anti-synthetic zealots, but on the other hand Alison Janney's character (Col Howell) was happy to use the sapient running bombs. - also, there's no reason to make those bombs bipedal, or even sapient. - as with Captain America 2, sinking all your money into one (or three, in CATWS's case) megaweapon is a poor allocation of resources. - Simulants having that big hollow zone in their heads doesn't make a lot of sense. There's no compelling aesthetic reason for simulants not to have fully human-looking heads. - it felt underexplained why the Americans couldn't have destroyed Alphie and let Joshua enact his "standby, not off" plan. - the monkey activating the detonator was cool, but honestly once that explosive was planted it should have just been on a timer. - So did Drew just flip sides? How was he an American combatant but five years later he was living free in New Asia? And Joshua knew where he was and that he'd be an ally, but the Americans like Howell didn't? [neither a plus nor a minus] Hans Zimmer's score was fine but I don't think it was iconic like his most famous scores. + the Vietnam allusion/allegory was solid and I was pleased it wasn't outrageously jingoistic pro-American. + the art design evoked Syd Mead a lot, esp with those 45 degree angles in the buildings and NOMAD. - surely the Buddhist (?) synthetics could have recruited some human local to turn off Maya's life support long before Joshua happened to arrive. - I couldn't buy that multi-thousand tons of NOMAD chunks could crash into land and sea from a few kilometers up and it wasn't a major catastrophe on its own. Instead people were running towards the wreckages immediately. All those negatives above are just my usual plot nitpicks, but specifically about what the film was trying to achieve, I think: * the film under-executed on drawing a more concrete father-daughter connection between Joshua and Alphie, who is the child of Maya. * I saw a review say that Joshua gradually becomes radicalized over the course of this film, but for me that doesn't feel fully fleshed out, in that I never felt like I could see Joshua's convictions changing. What little motivation I got was that he was trying to do right by Alphie and Maya. And it's nice to have a personal connection to the fight, but this is a case where I wanted him to have an opinion (or a more obviously drawn one) about the war.

I read years ago that studios get 90% of the first run ticket revenue*. Movie chains make their profits on popcorn, soda, and other snacks. * apparently it’s a more complicated formula, but still above 50%: https://entertainment.howstuffworks.com/movie-distribution2.htm

‘Past Lives’: how Celine Song made the year’s best indie movie

I feel like Rick and Morty at its best really explores every possible ramification of their insane ideas, and that's something where maybe Futurama has not been quite as strong. Like, here the idea that parasites have their own parasites is something, but then the resolution was just to stomp the parasite-parasites. Why weren't the second order parasites also themselves subverted by third order parasites, and so on? Separately, the Dune sandworm lifecycle was sort of referenced with the cycle of life in the litterbox, but it didn't fully land because they rushed over it so quickly. I guess Dune is a lot to cover in a single 24 minute episode.

At the time, Disney-Marvel’s live action efforts were split in two (even leaving aside all the characters licensed away to other studios). Feige had the movies and cheapskate/terrible person Ike Perlmutter was demoted to TV. Also, Jeph Loeb was leading efforts on the TV side and he also sucked. So aside from the practical difficulties of trying to coordinate between the movies and TV, there was also the problem of the TV side being led by people with really bad ideas. And it’s not like Iger could have fixed this much earlier. Perlmutter owned Marvel before selling to Disney, and retained clout just for his wealth and shares. Disney demoted Perlmutter because Feige was more successful, and then took TV away from Perlmutter too because whatever the handicaps of working without the full blessing of the movie side were, the TV side wasn’t executing that well either, most notably in the Inhumans debacle.

100% Soft, who designed the Twitter She-Hulk emojis and the Avongers merch in the show, will sell a KEVIN toy as an SDCC exclusive. https://gizmodo.com/marvel-studios-kevin-comic-con-she-hulk-100-soft-toy-1850647356

Fair, but then again, second run is a small, small part of box office revenue. I think studios/distributors take 90% of the ticket on first run films, and a much smaller cut on second run, which also has cheaper ticket prices. It’s not just Disney/D+ and WB/Max. Even studios without major streaming services (wait, is that just Sony?) have movies come up on DVD or digital rent in a similar time frame. Uncharted was available digitally nine weeks after release, and on physical media about two more weeks after that. (Then on Netflix another three months after DVD.) and even with short windows, GOTG3 did very well.

The company asked for this back when growing Disney Plus was the top priority. One SW show and one MCU show a year would never have gotten the subscriber base to where it is now. And then Marvel pulled itself in two directions, both saying you should watch all the shows and that the shows weren’t crucial to following the connected MCU story of the movies. That said, even with Disney Plus upending priorities, even with Covid scrambling productions, it’s pretty clear Marvel never planned to do a full Avengers type movie to cap off Phase 4. Absolutely mystifying decision. Phase 1 was focused. Phase 2 was a bit of a mess — high quality overall, but it’s not like most of them felt like they were building towards Ultron. But it’s fine, just throw an Avengers movie to wrap up the phase. The interconnectedness of the MCU felt sparse in phase 4, esp after phase 3 had two Avengers movies and a quasi-Avengers movie in Captain America 3. That’s not cause Marvel made too much stuff or even too many TV shows, but definitely too many without team-up projects that help focus attention.

Elle has a thoughtful and heartfelt interview with Greta Lee and Teo Yoo.

Funny thing is, “wah” in Cantonese is basically the same as the Korean “wah”. There was a lot going on under the surface of this movie and I look forward to revisiting it after some time to let it all sink in. On a much more superficial level I’m absolutely tickled at how this is a lightly fictionalized version of writer-director Song’s life, inspired by a real event… and meanwhile, her real life husband wrote “Challengers”, out this fall, which looks to also be a love triangle ish story, but very very different. Also, his version is about tennis players and not writers. But still!

Perry White is remarkably blasé about giant war robots fighting on the docks. I'm also disappointed in Jimmy for not setting his camera to video, and for the whole intern team for not, say, requesting security footage from the docks either. There's serious property damage there! Giant robots wrecking the place would be a page 1 story even without Superman! LMAO the end titles sequence is so anime it's incredible. I know a lot of people are talking about how kid Clark has the "cool S" on his shirt, but for my money the ends of the S should be angled, not squared off. @Galileo908, "Flamebird" here is a Silver Age reference. I really enjoyed that this take on designing his costume had a sort of New 52 look and then Clark and his mom added back the red trunks and belt. Oh snap, Amanda Waller as the big antagonist??? That's cool. Hope this one is smart enough to not think she can recruit a gymnastic psycho and a boomerang-themed crook as the core pieces to an anti-Superman force.

I didn't know about Maisel. Now I'm reading a Hollywood Reporter piece from 2016 which also talks about him. As impressive as it was to move Marvel into producing its own movies, esp with the notoriously cheap Perlmutter in charge, as impressive as it was to line up financing that could get Iron Man funded, as important as it was to get Favreau and RDJ on Iron Man 1, Maisel left in 2009. Marvel's whole phase 1 (which lasted till 2012!) was a miracle as the rest of Hollywood kept thinking the superhero bubble was going to burst with each subsequent movie. Credit Maisel with Iron Man and Hulk, but I feel like Feige should get more credit than Maisel, because Feige's kept it going up till now.

I got the art book and it's spectacular. This is the (mainstream?) movie that looks the most like pure concept art put directly on screen, but it's still cool to see concept art for the movie and some discussion of why the worlds look the way they do. I hadn't realized that the future world (Earth 928?) has architectural lines overrunning the actual lines of the structure to make it look more like the Copic marker concept art they were inspired by. The book must have been locked down before the movie was, because there's a whole piece about the Bar With No Name (a bar for Marvel villains; it's been in the comics for a long time) and the bartender there; neither of which show up at all in the final movie.

NYT: ‘Joy Ride,’ ‘Shortcomings,’ ‘Beef’ and the Onscreen Rise of the Flawed Asian American

It's been so long since I read the Spider-Verse comics, but I was just looking back at it. The movie actually pulls so heavily from the issue where Spider-Woman/Ghost Spider/Spider-Gwen was first introduced. Her origin, standing up for Peter Parker, Peter dying in her arms after reverting from the Lizard formula, losing herself in her drumming and thus messing up the band's song, being held at gunpoint by her dad and accused of murdering Peter, even her speech to her dad about the Spider-Woman mask being her badge.

Sony is working on a Silk TV show, with Lord and Miller in some exec producing role. With the Lord & Miller connection, you'd definitely think Silk might show up. Plus there was originally some rumor in 2019 that Sony was developing an animated spinoff of the Spider-Verse movies that would star female Spiders. Gwen, Peni and now Jessica are a good start but I'd certainly think they could fit a few more in the movie if that's the plan. There's been more recent news that Sony is still working on an animated Spider-Woman movie, but who knows if that's a multiversal team-up.