Category: Broken Girl Media

Film, Television, Radio, and Gaming

Personally, I love this concept, and I’m very happy to see Feige and the Russos going for it.

There isn’t room in the MCU for two armored super-geniuses… trying to introduce a conventional Victor Von Doom into that world would be like trying to retrofit Latveria into a world where we’ve already established the concept of Sokovia. It all seems duplicative, even with a multiverse to power it.

But the idea that each universe gets —spiritually speaking— one Tony Stark, and that said Stark —with his titanic ego and willingness to do things he shouldn’t— could easily go bad…? Why wouldn’t a disillusioned Tony just buy out/conquer a Slavic city-state, establish his idea of a utopia, become paranoid enough to live 24/7 in his metal suit, and start allowing the locals to call him “Doom”? With sufficient infrastructure, he could fend off all of his world’s Avengers indefinitely, and claim national sovereignty every time they approach him.

It works, and by using RDJ’s charisma to carry the switcheroo, Feige will do more to cement the concept of the multiverse than 1,000 iterations of Kang ever could.

Meanwhile, on the business front… I’m betting Downey is about to take home $100 million for just one of these movies. So the bean-counters’ goal is likely for him to add at least another 3 or 4 billion to DIsney’s coffers. There’s a *lot* riding on this.

So these will be the most heavily promoted films in Hollywood history… and if I’m James Gunn, I’m already rescheduling everything DC has planned to avoid getting wrecked. RDJDoom is not something he wants his new Superman to face.

Robert Downey Jr to star as Marvel’s Doctor Doom in Avengers Doomsday and Secret Wars

BBC.COM

Do yourself a favor: do not waste your time with the Benioff/Weiss dog-turd that is 3 Body Problem, and watch the Chinese Three-Body instead.

Reasons? There are many.

  1. The Netflix show is eight hours long. The Chinese Three-Body is a thirty hour series. Needless to say, the pacing is completely different.
  2. Thirty years ago, people wouldn’t watch anything with subtitles… today, y’all watch shit in English with the captions running. So the language barrier is no impediment.
  3. There are long stretches of dialog in T-B that are taken word-for-word from the book, while 3BP seems only tangentially aware that the book exists.
  4. T-B takes only one significant departure from the structure of the book, but it’s a harmless one that just makes it a little more mysterious from the start. 3BP, meanwhile, splits the main character into five, and runs away in a panic every time the story asks the audience to care about science.
  5. Seriously, Netflix, not everything has to be rewritten to be multicultural. The Three-Body Problem —the book— is a Chinese story about Chinese scientists and Chinese politics, and that’s the show I want to see.
  6. What makes TT-BP so compelling is that it’s plausible. Scientists think like scientists, cops think like cops, and apocalyptic cultists think like apocalyptic cultists. And most of that makes it into T-B. As opposed to 3BP, where motivations aren’t so much opaque as non-existent, and the characters only do whatever will most efficiently get us to the next scene.
  7. I’ll grant you, if T-B were an American production, it would feel like it was made in 2010… it’s all Dutch angles, rapid cuts, and skittering camera work. But it’s set in 2007, so who cares?
  8. If you want to understand how differently these productions approach the source material, just look at the cosmic microwave background scene. Observe as Wang Miao in T-B frantically pours over dot-matrix print outs of satellite data with deepening horror, while the entire world of 3BP just walks outside, looks up, and goes “that’s peculiar”. You can practically feel Benioff and Weiss wanting to just write it all off to space dragons or something and move on to the next cool visual.
  9. Speaking of dragons, T-B is 100% free of any remnants of the cast of Game of Thrones… I didn’t realize this before, but I never want to think about Samwell Tarley again.

Okay, so that was more like it.

I like Fifteen, I like Ruby Sunday, and I love how deftly RTD blends creepy grotesques with goofy nonsense. Honestly, it was more satisfying than the return of Ten/Fourteen and Donna… after giving up on Thirteen a few episodes into her tenure, I’m surprised at how much I enjoyed starting over.

Now I’m looking forward to Spring for more than the next Gathering.

Someone get ready to comfort the MAGA fucks: turns out Rankin/Bass’s The Year Without a Santa Claus (1974) was —and I believe this is the technical term— woke as fuck.

I mean, they made a Christmas movie where Santa is a narcisstic, entitled old white man whose petty self-indulgence wreaks havoc on a world toward which he is alternately indifferent and resentful. A movie where the plucky, adventurous, overconfident hero isn’t just a girl, but Mrs. Claus herself. A movie where the primary antagonists are avatars of male toxicity who turn out to be using random violence and cruelty to avoid dealing with their mommy issues.

Clearly, the mind-virus has been circulating for decades.

(For the record, Heat Miser scared the shit out of me when I was five.)

I just love this shit. The girls and I are watching it right now, and I still find my toe tapping when the songs come on. I know most people are all about Rudolph, and I’m gonna say that Santa Claus Is Coming To Town is still my favorite of the Rankin/Bass movies, but TYWASC is a close second.

I think you mentioned sometime back that you watch Tik Toks, do you have…

I think you mentioned sometime back that you watch Tik Toks, do you have a favourite gen z song?

bedtimestoriesforbrokengirls:

What are we calling “Gen Z” in this context? Do Lana Del Rey and Lorde and Tove Lo and First Aid Kit count? If so, then there are a number of contenders.

If it needs to be late 20teens stuff, though? Fuck, I dunno. Something from Billie Eilish, maybe? George Ezra’s too old, I think. Umm… Dave’s “Lesley”. Let’s go with that.

2023 update:

  • Doja Cat — “Demons” & “Paint the Town Red”
  • Harry Styles — “As It Was” & “Sign of the Times”
  • SZA — “Kill Bill”
  • Sam Smith — “Unholy”
  • Olivia Rodrigo — “Vampire”
  • Sabrina Carpenter — “Because I Liked A Boy”
  • Tate McRae — “Feel Like Shit” & “You Broke Me FIrst”
  • Charles McMansion — “T.I.P.” (Heh.)
  • Gayle — “abcdefu”
  • Madison Beer — “Boyshit” & “Selfish”