the casual critic

superheroes

#films #fiction #superheroes

Every now and then a movie surprises you. That’s not unusual, but I hadn’t expected that movie to be Marvel’s Thunderbolts*. I too am no stranger to ‘Marvel Fatigue’ and have not really been invested in anything after Endgame with the exception of Loki and WandaVision*. When enjoying a movie requires an advanced degree in Marvelology you have lost me. Thunderbolts* only got its viewing as a sort of last hurrah before our Disney+ subscription goes the way of the OG Avengers. So it was a pleasant surprise when it wasn’t just a half-decent superhero movie, but offered an radically interesting perspective on mental health and redemption.

Warning, contains spoilers

Several elements make Thunderbolts* stand out from the recent Marvel fare. For one, it manages to take itself lightly without getting zany. While in the opening scenes we see Yelena Belova (Black Widow’s adopted sister, played by Florence Pugh) at work ‘cleaning up’ some off-the-books lab run by the movies baddie, we simultaneously hear her narrating how even her work cannot fill the emptiness she feels inside. The contrast is poignant, but ends in a lighthearted flourish when visuals and narration synchronize to show us Belova has been talking to a tied-up goon all this time. A goon who clearly has more important things on his mind than an assassin’s existential angst.

Read more...

About the author

A long time ago, I had a blog of political polemics. Then life happened and I stopped writing.

Yet the desire to write never went away, and so this blog was born. Of polemics we already have a sufficiency, however. One only has to read a news site. Instead, I am trying my hand at reflections on the cultural artefacts I ‘consume’: books, games, movies, and so forth.

The name of this blog expresses my capacity as an ordinary consumer, and hence merely a ‘casual’ critic. I cannot boast of a degree in art history, cultural studies or English (or any other) language. Nor am I a paid reviewer. I do believe though that most authors create an artefact because they want their audience to actively engage with it, rather than merely consume it passively. Writing reviews is my way of entering into dialogue with a text, as well as an opportunity to be creatively active myself. If people enjoy reading the end product, then so much the better.

About the blog

The function of this blog strongly informed its form. I ended up on Write.as because of the minimalist aesthetic and the deliberate absence of social media plug-ins, Fediverse integrations excepted. There is no SEO, and no trackers. It does mean that the blog lacks some features that readers will have come to expect, most notably the ability to comment and a navigation menu or archive.

To help find your way around, Write.as uses hashtags. Clicking a hashtag will generate a page listing all the posts with the same hashtag. I do my best to label all reviews, and my most common hashtags are at the end of this page.

Posts will be cross-posted to my Mastodon feed, so feel free to leave a comment there. Any feedback or response is much appreciated. You can also subscribe to receive future blogs via email using the ‘Subscribe’ button at the bottom of the homepage, or by adding this blog to an RSS feed.

How to navigate

Every post has one or more tags (‘#’) associated with it to help categorise it. Instead of using menus, you can click on a tag to retrieve all posts with the same tag. You can do this from within any blog post, or you can use the list below.

Mediums #books #films #theatre #tv #videogames

Type #fiction #nonfiction

Fiction genres #fantasy #literature #SF #speculative #cyberpunk #solarpunk #superheroes

Non-fiction categories #history #politics #tech #culture #unions #socialism

#tv #fiction #superheroes #SF

Warning – contains spoilers

What happens after the revolution? It is a question that is somewhat of a liability for the Left, with a tradition of unsatisfyingly vague answers tracing back all the way to Marx’ (in)famous quip that his job wasn’t to write cookbooks for the post-revolutionary society. It may therefore come as a bit of a surprise to see this question taken up as the central theme of a series in, of all places, the Marvel universe.

Loki season 2 picks up from the end of Loki season 1, where we saw ‘He Who Remains’ killed at the hand of Sylvie (implausibly the only female Loki variant we ever see), and a sacred timeline shattering into infinite fragments. ‘Our’ Loki finds himself in an unfamiliar timeline, now one of many, and quickly discovers that HRW wasn’t lying about the universe tearing itself to shreds now that the Sacred Timeline is no more. Unbeknownst to the Powers that Were at the TVA, they had a ‘Temporal Loom’ in the basement which had the job of keeping the known universe together. Unable to cope with the manifold new timelines, it is in danger of falling apart, taking the universes with it. It is up to Loki, assisted by like-minded TVA employees, to fix this piece of pseudoscientific technobabble and keep the universe together.

Read more...