jessica jones

Six Damn Fine Degrees #60: My daughter, the Marvel fan

Mege1 Comment

Welcome to Six Damn Fine Degrees. These instalments will be inspired by the idea of six degrees of separation in the loosest sense. The only rule: it connects – in some way – to the previous instalment. So come join us on our weekly foray into interconnectedness!

I would have liked to dazzle you with a cool origin story, but I can’t remember how and when my favourite daughter found her love for the Marvel Cinematic Universe. I am pretty sure she saw the first few movies in chronological sequence at home on BluRay, too young to have seen then in the theatres, so Tony Stark, Cap and the Hulk came to her at home, and it was probably the first Avengers movie that she saw in an upholstered seat, ticket in hand, with a bag of popcorn, on the big silver screen. But she was hooked long before that.

Continue reading →

A Damn Fine Cup of Culture Podcast #8: Annihilation

Matt6 Comments

d1ad56da-abce-4afe-9f45-79294aede9e3Tune in for episode 8 of A Damn Fine Cup of Culture, which takes us to Area X and the Shimmer. Will we come back from our discussion of Alex Garland’s Annihilation unchanged? We also spend an all too short summer vacation in early ’80s Italy with Call Me By Your Name‘s Elio and Oliver and have a quick drink with Jessica Jones (watch out for season 2 spoilers from 11:40 to 13:10). Continue reading →

Everybody was kung-fu fighting

MattLeave a comment

Roughly halfway through the first episode of American Gods, the TV adaptation of Neil Gaiman’s novel, its protagonist Shadow finds a large, bearded Irish American calling himself Mad Sweeney getting right in his face. The self-described leprechaun keeps goading Shadow, newly released from jail and trying to keep out of trouble. Finally, Mad Sweeney finds the right button to press – and gets exactly what he wanted: a fist in the face and a shit-kicking bar fight.

Afterwards, as the screen cut to black, my wife turns to me and says, “Now that is how you do a fight scene.”

American Gods

Continue reading →

Biff, bang, pow! Or: An age of small-screen Marvels?

MattLeave a comment

I’ll be honest: while I’d say that I enjoyed the majority of Marvel movies to date, the thing I’m least interested in is the fights. There are some fun, well-shot and -choreographed kerfuffles in the films, but on the whole I like them heroes less when they speak with their fists, repulsor beams and mythical hammers. What’s worse than a Marvel movie fight scene, though? A Marvel TV series fight scene.

daredevil Continue reading →

Bring me the head of 2016

MegeLeave a comment

rogueoneoldstyleposterIn a lot of ways, 2016 was the year to get suspicious about a lot of things, most of all about the future, and maybe some of us even got superstitious a little bit. As far as my movies are concerned, I think I detect a pattern: the two movies I liked best in 2015, Whiplash and Birdman, ran here in January, and 2016 began with Carol and The Big Short, another couple of great movies. Superstition? Coincidence? Perhaps. I can’t quite shake the feeling that this year, you had to dig slightly deeper to find a really good movie. I wrote about The Assassin and American Honey, which are far from light entertainment, but are immensely rewarding and beautiful to look at. I also highly recommend Sing Street for its youthful irreverence and its music; Arrival, for its use of the sci-fi genre to learn a lot more about us humans than about the extraterrestrials (if you haven’t read thirithch’s excellent review, you should do so). And Rogue One, which tried hard not to be a blockbuster and was all the more successful because of it. Continue reading →

If only you could talk to the mobsters

MattLeave a comment

At this year’s San Diego Comic Con, Marvel once again planted a big, wet kiss on the fans’ mouths, with new footage and casting information covering everything from Captain Marvel (yay for female superheroes, double yay for Alison Brie) to Doctor Strange (nice-looking trailer, even if it looks a bit too much like a mashup of The Matrix and Inception). There were also a couple of titbits for those following the Netflix series, including an action-packed teaser for Luke Cage. I liked the character in Jessica Jones and I thought it’d be interesting to have a new Marvel property with a strong, individual style, so the promise of a blaxploitation-inspired series combined with a more modern sensitivity intrigued me.

Cue the teaser, which has Luke taking on a bunch of goons with the aid of his super strength and a car door, all biff-, bam- and pow-like. I’ve seen some fan reactions, and they all seem to agree: this is shaping up to be a badass series for a badass character.

Myself? I found it boring. Continue reading →