Excelsior, True Believers! The Mighty Marvel Movie Thread

[Olli T]

Damn, though

[estragon]

The teams (or single team?) doing trailers Thor: Ragnarok and Black Panther are really nailing it.

On the other hand, the scene where Black Panther fights Bad Black Panther makes me less interested in the movie itself. I think the only Marvel movie where The Hero, But Bad worked as an antagonist was Winter Soldier, and that was mostly because the main thrust of the movie wasn't so much Cap vs. Bucky, but rather Cap vs. The Security State. I hope Bad Black Panther is some minor incident resolved early on and not the crux of the story or the climax the movie leads up to...

[TheSL]

Originally Posted by estragon

On the other hand, the scene where Black Panther fights Bad Black Panther makes me less interested in the movie itself.

Well, Black Panther's traditional foes are sometimes...less sensitive culturally.

[muteKi]

FWIW, the use of Immigrant Song in the Ragnarok trailer is, indeed, quite inspired.

[Torzelbaum]

Originally Posted by Bongo Bill

Gotta remind people that they have already seen this character, I guess.

"Hey, did you forget that Hobbit trilogy Bilbo is in the MCU now?

[Büge]

Originally Posted by Torzelbaum

"Hey, did you forget that Hobbit trilogy Bilbo is in the MCU now?

[Vaeran]

I am destroyed.

[Vaeran]

I am briefly un-destroyed to tell you that The Punisher now has a release date: November 17

[Adrenaline]

There are reviews for Thor 3 and they are pretty good

[Ample Vigour]

Originally Posted by estragon

The teams (or single team?) doing trailers Thor: Ragnarok and Black Panther are really nailing it.

On the other hand, the scene where Black Panther fights Bad Black Panther makes me less interested in the movie itself. I think the only Marvel movie where The Hero, But Bad worked as an antagonist was Winter Soldier, and that was mostly because the main thrust of the movie wasn't so much Cap vs. Bucky, but rather Cap vs. The Security State. I hope Bad Black Panther is some minor incident resolved early on and not the crux of the story or the climax the movie leads up to...

I want Black Panther to fight Evil Creed and I want that fight to last... many minutes.

[estragon]

Originally Posted by Ample Vigour

I want Black Panther to fight Evil Creed and I want that fight to last... many minutes.

I really like Michael B. Jordon, and I am down to watch him do pretty much whatever.

Two stunt doubles in matching Good and Evil cat-suits though? Well . . .

[Vaeran]

WOO, CATFIGHT

[Positronic Brain]

I finished watching Defenders and, yes, it was boring. The only thing that was fun was the supporting cast meeting each other, and that really wore off its novelty soon.

I curse Daredevil S2 for ruining ninja's for me, and for making Elektra such a bore. Also, most of the cast was squandered here, and I resent that this was basically Daredevil S3. This is a series that culminates with a fight against an army of ninjas deep down Manhattan among the corpse of a dragon - sounds so cool in paper, but I was just watching the clock to see how much I had to endure until the series ended. And the blame is squarely in the writers, who didn't have the imagination or budget (or both) to properly use their superpowered cast. Heck, Luke Cage's big idea for surprising the bad guys in the last episode was awful, and something I'd expect from a first year high school play.

The only two good things that happened here are a) Misty Knight will finally have a excuse to get that robot arm and b) Sigourney Weaver will be able to make the next payment for her winter mansion. Bonus: I won't have to stand Stick anymore, unless *groan* the Hand resurrects him.

[Büge]

Yay, Valkyrie is bisexual.

Boo, it's bisexual-in-name-only.

"Representation" doesn't mean anything if you don't represent.

[Vaeran]

That's really disappointing. Reminds me of (as alluded to in the /Film article) J.K. Rowling trying to get credit after the fact by claiming there was actually invisible diversity all along in the HP books. Oh Dumbledore was actually gay but you'd never know it, oh there were Jewish students at Hogwarts but they never did anything noteworthy, oh it was a melting pot. Fuck you. Have the courage of your convictions and actually depict the diversity you claim exists in your work. No points for Gryffindor.

[Bleck]

At least we're getting that depiction in the fourteen Dumbledore prequel films, wooo

[muteKi]

Originally Posted by Bleck

fourteen Dumbledore prequel films

at this point I have no effin' clue what's real and what's not in terms of production rumors. it all sounds equally plausible in our post-emoji movie world

[Torzelbaum]

Originally Posted by Büge

Yay, Valkyrie is bisexual.

Boo, it's bisexual-in-name-only.

Does that mean the Bifrost actually only has one frost?

[Pombar]

Originally Posted by Vaeran

That's really disappointing. Reminds me of (as alluded to in the /Film article) J.K. Rowling trying to get credit after the fact by claiming there was actually invisible diversity all along in the HP books. Oh Dumbledore was actually gay but you'd never know it, oh there were Jewish students at Hogwarts but they never did anything noteworthy, oh it was a melting pot. Fuck you. Have the courage of your convictions and actually depict the diversity you claim exists in your work. No points for Gryffindor.

Dumbledore I get but did we need every ethnicity explicitly pointed to? It might be weird for Americans to not see any obvious visible Jewish people but demographics in the UK are a bit different, no? HP basically had similar makeup to a modern day public school like Eton and Harrow, on which it is modeled. Had a few represented minorities as one might expect from a UK school of that kind. The stranger thing was the all-white, all British teaching staff. I guess when the UK only has one wizarding school it has enough wasp teachers for that to be possible.

Plus religion was deliberately avoided as much as possible in HP to avoid how it may or may not interact with the magic stuff (she didn’t want to write an anti-God fable, that was Pullman’s pet project).

[Karzac]

Religion was avoided, except, you know, everyone celebrates Christmas and Easter and makes a huge deal of it in every book. And there are a bunch of mentions of saints.

EDIT: Also, to be clear, the critique about the conspicuous absence of Jewish students from Hogwarts stems from the fact that goblins are portrayed in a way very much in line with Jewish stereotypes (hooked noses, pockmarked skin, greedy, conniving, work in banks, speak nonsense language). Paired with the fact that there are no actual Jews in the wizarding world (save for, apparently, that one dickish Goldstein kid in book five), it really seems like the goblins are meant to be stand-ins for Jews and that's something worth critiquing.

[Pombar]

Though those events are celebrated as irreligious modern and secular holidays rather than as religious events - the weasleys don’t go to mass or quaker meeting on xmas morning, and I guess the idea was that British kids would find it weirder for xmas to not be celebrated (in keeping with her avoiding making any critiques of religion).

Certainly anti-semitic stereotypes in fantasy and scifi creatures are a real issue that creators all too often overlook when they replicate, but it doesn’t seem likely that she decided to leave out Jewish characters due to feeling like they were already represented by Goblins. Seems more like she didn’t think to include any because it’s not a significant minority group in her life or her idea of traditional British public schools while also but separately regurgitating problematic elements inherent in certain fantasy tropes.

However upon rereading it seems like the original point was that, like with her after-the-fact outing of Dumbledore, she tried to claim diversity by having Jewish students where she hadn’t included any in the books. That’s weak.

[Vaeran]

Originally Posted by Pombar

However upon rereading it seems like the original point was that, like with her after-the-fact outing of Dumbledore, she tried to claim diversity by having Jewish students where she hadn’t included any in the books. That’s weak.

Yeah.

JK Rowling confirms that there were Jewish wizards at Hogwarts

These are happy days for Harry Potter fans. Not only are they getting daily snippets of a new Harry Potter “ghost plot” that JK Rowling is unveiling for Advent on her website Pottermore, but the author - always very active on Twitter - has also taken to the social network to confirm that Hogwarts was, or is, a diverse school.

In response to inquiries from her Jewish fans, Rowling clarified last night that there were Jewish students at the wizardry school and revealed the name of one of them, Anthony Goldstein, who was among the original 40 students she created for the first book in the series, Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone. She also assured fans there would be LGBT students in the school, as well as anyone from any “religion/belief/non-belief system” – except for Wiccans (a reference perhaps to the longrunning debate among American fundamentalists as to whether the saga promoted witchcraft).

"Yeah there were totally whatever kind of students you said, they were all over the place doing the same stuff you do and totally representing your miscellaneous identity. I just couldn't find space in 17,000 pages to mention any of them. Here's the name of one of them though, enjoy knowing that he never did anything worth reading about. (Wiccans can specifically get fucked tho)"

[Zef]

And this is why I will always hold fast to Death of the Author.

I mean, yeah, the creators can say whatever they want about their work post-facto. But if it's not actually there, it's not there. Period. Not even if you claim you put in hints so vague and unreasonable that you need to clarify them yourself in a random interview that only contemporaries will have access to, let alone remember fifty years from now.

[estragon]

The flipside of the death of the author of it is that people were reading Dumbledore as gay for Grindelwald before Rowling announced it, and that reading was already valid before she gave it her blessing.

[Daikaiju]

[Zef]

Originally Posted by estragon

The flipside of the death of the author of it is that people were reading Dumbledore as gay for Grindelwald before Rowling announced it, and that reading was already valid before she gave it her blessing.

I would assume that people reading that had found evidence to present that argument, making it a valid interpretation. Rowling's post-facto blessing would then bolster its validity up until the point someone else interpreted the text to argue against it. Both interpretations could then coexist.

Kinda like the recent "Is Snape trans?" argument. Fans came up with it on their own, using the text itself as basis. Its subjectivity doesn't make it any less valid an interpretation, it just remains that: an interpretation.

When the community comes up with something like this from the text, its great. I'm all for diversity of representation and diversity of interpretation. When the author tries to cling to it for brownie points, without ACTUALLY putting in the effort, it chafes.

[conchobhar]

Originally Posted by Zef

When the community comes up with it on its own, its great. I'm all for diversity of representation and diversity of interpretation. When the author tries to cling to it for brownie points, without ACTUALLY putting in the effort, it chafes.

Yes. Likewise, it's great if a fan wants to "read in" and assume a racially and religiously diverse Hogwarts; Rowling claiming that it actually, canonically was, and it just strangely never came up is stupid.

[estragon]

The other other flipside of the death of the author is that the author gets to have their own readings of their own works. Authorial readings aren't authoritative, but they're potentially worth considering.

[Vaeran]

There's no reading of Harry Potter, by the author or otherwise, which could extrapolate that there was totally a Jewish wizard named Anthony Goldstein in Harry's class (and also members of every "religion/belief/non-belief system") if none of those things were ever mentioned. J.K. Rowling may give herself an A+ for representation, but it's based on things that have no support in the text itself.

[estragon]

Originally Posted by Vaeran

There's no reading of Harry Potter, by the author or otherwise, which could extrapolate that there was totally a Jewish wizard named Anthony Goldstein in Harry's class

As a matter of fact, readers did assume that Anthony Goldstein was Jewish, before Rowling said so. (A quick twitter search shows people talking about this years earlier, so presumably also before twitter existed.)

There's a lot of valid criticism of Rowling and Harry Potter, but in both of the specific cases mentioned, Rowing was just confirming pre-existing readings.

(This is way off topic...)