Marvelous! Or, the Death of Cinema

It's another Marvel movie, and like most sequels in the Marvel Cinematic Universe, Ant Man and the Wasp doubles down on everything that was irritating and boring about its admittedly okay predecessor. It doesn't stand on its own as a film because it's just a prolonged set up for a plot mechanic in a future Avengers movie. Not too much to say here aside from the usual complaints, so for the first h...

Friend of the show and comic artist Graham joins the crew for a thorough filleting of one of the DCU's post-Justice League successes, the gleefully dumb light-hearted sci-fantasy romp "Aquaman." We discuss the origins of the character and his comic iterations, his nemesis Black Manta, the affable screen presence of star Jason Momoa,  gestural environmentalism, bad wet-for-dry, big dick willie d, a...

We're heckin back again with another freaking awesome Deadpool movie you little epic piggies to listen to. Just kidding, it's a step-down from the really just okay first one in literally every way possible. The jokes aren't very funny, the action sucks (and got a stunt person killed), all the meta-stuff you're supposed to point at is lame, and the writers were too dumb to realize they pulled a Wom...

Sorry for the delay on this one everyone, but on this super special episode of Marvelous!, we finally reach the moment Kevin Feige and his murderers row of enablers and sycophants have built up to since 2008. Hailed by critics and audiences alike and celebrated for its "complex" sneaker-faced purple villain/having the audacity to kill half its cast before the next one (or subsequent movies) revive...

For our inaugural Patreon Raffle, Nicole's friend Jack* won and mercifully gave us the option of watching either the defanged RoboCop remake or European mega-bomb Valerian and the City of a Thousand Planets starring two of the worst actors we've watched on the pod thus far: sick and dying actor Dane Dehaan from The Amazing Spider-Man 2 and Cara "Peg the Patriarchy" Delevingne from Suicide Squad. I...

Steven Spielberg. Colossus of film. Father of the modern blockbuster. Gamer. Ernest Cline. Author. Dreamweaver. Redditor. United, these two titans bring us the ultimate in entertainment product, that last movie ever made, the one where a guy jumps Doc Brown's DeLorean over the Iron Giant while RX-78 Gundam Fights Mechagodzilla. This week, the gang tackles the film that defines the death of cinema:...

Venom. He's a slime guy, he has big teeth, a Spiderman villain without a Spiderman, cast adrift into the seas of franchise uncertainty. In this appropriately amorphous, wide ranging episode we discuss the Venom character in comics, Tom Hardy's weirdo performance, Sony's jockying for position in it's tense shared-franchise relationship with Disney, the economics of modern franchise blockbusters, Co...

In our most controversial episode yet, we take a look at the only black led movie ever made, the film that ended racism in America and dislodged the cheeto from the throat of its government: Black Panther (no relation). In this exciting episode you'll find: Stan Lee is a wily bastard, Jack Kirby talks like an old man, Afrofuturism as laser-shooting spears, bad cgi doubles, the limits of the libera...

In the grand tradition of raining on everyone's parade, we're bucking our usual schedule and revisiting/taking to task the critically acclaimed, Academy Award winning Sony Animation extravaganza Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse, a film Letterboxd users have rated as better than Goodfellas, Sunset Boulevard, and Persona. While the internet is currently freaking out over trans-coded Gwen Stacy, Nic...

Five years ago, a mysterious and terrible force struck our culture like a meteor - laying waste to fandoms, blogs, video essays and fanfic websites. Now, present day, present time, three intrepid podcasters set out across the irradiated rubble of dessicated dead discourse, into the scorched wounds of a dying film franchise, and sift through the ashes and entrails to bring you the final word on The...

In this luxurious, deluxe episode the crew bring you two movies for the length of three: Justice League (2017) and Zack Snyder's Justice League (2021). We outline the troubled production and personal tragedy that led to Snyder's ouster from his superhero magnum opus, and how WB brought in noted male feminist Joss Whedon to work his MCU magic, soy-up the grim epic and bring the runtime down to a sv...

With the release of The Flash on the summer movie horizon, we're unlocking our Patreon bonus special investigative report on Ezra Miller and their crazy ass 2022.  WB-Discovery cancelled basically everything except their upcoming The Flash movie, the basket in which the newly forged juggernaut of classic films, DC superheroes and Shark Week has decided to put all their eggs? Ezra Miller. Once indi...

The winner of our first patron raffle, the crew is forced to talk about Valerian, the already-forgotten bankruptcy inducing french pedophile sci-fi epic. In this exclusive excerpt, Cole breaks the simulation on Cara Delevingne's eyebrows. For the full after-dark exclusive episode , subscribe to our Patreon . Just $3/month provides access to all subscriber-exclusive content, VIP discord events and...

On this episode Stu and Cole bully Nicole for enjoying things. Cole tells us about Thor and Hulk in comics, and how the MCU films have sold them both short. We discuss how a film that seems to want to be so whimsical and colorful seems to fall so flat, and how director Taika Waititi seems totally apathetic towards if not contemptuous of fantasy and science fiction: The small-minded and unimaginati...

In this special bonus episode, Andy from Those Good Old Fashioned Values joins the pod to walk us through a retrospective on the formative years of this generation spanning cartoon franchise, its origin in independent comics, and a discussion of the surprisingly well-crafted and endearingly corny 1990 live action film. But first, Nicole makes a horrifying discovery about Turtle biology. Check out...

What if they made a comic-book movie... for grown ups? It's Logan! It's Wolverine! Remember Wolverine? He's old and sad. He says fuck. He chops dudes arms off. Professor X says swears and poops his pants. Everybody dies in the grim dark future of six years from now. We liked it ok, it's good but not as good as you remember, but we get to enjoy some great performances, fun gore, and discuss just wh...

Nicole reckons with her cringe girlboss past, Stu spergs about how badly they got WWI wrong, new permanent third mic Cole has some wild shit to tell you about Wonder Woman comics lore. How could you take something as wild as a demigoddess created by a Freudian bdsm polycule and turn it into this bland rehash of First Avenger? How could you take a solid cast of stars and character actors and force...

Cole (@java_jigga) returns once again to help us out with Spidey's grand foray into the Marvel Cinematic Universe (and Disney shareholders' wallets), Spider-Man: Homecoming. After a prolonged and ugly custody battle, Sony begrudgingly offered Marvel Studios to share parental rights over their little baby cash cow, and the result is yet another genre pastiche with the visual tactility of a Verizon...

Spiderman expert Cole returns to take us from the close of the 1980s Bronze Age of Comics and into the modern day, with the rise and fall of independent comics, 'adult' subjects, edginess, Marvel's bankruptcy, and the decline of mainstream American comics in the 21st century through the lens of Marvel's flagship webhead. This is the second part of a two part series. Next time, we'll be watching Sp...

Noted comics scholar Cole ( @java_jigga ) joins us to discuss the History of Spiderman as a character and brand, from his origins in the 1960s, through major lore moments, changes in creative staff, behind the scenes shenanigans, and the long weird history of licensed spin-offs, including a Japanese live-action series from the 1970s that had a formative role in the tokusatsu/sentai genre of televi...

We ring in the new year and year two of the podcast not adrift in the Marvel Cinematic Universe, but somewhere a long time ago in a galaxy far far away (but still owned by the Walt Disney corporation).  The Force Awakens: woke SJW propaganda, the Walt Disney Company's hollow retread of A New Hope, a Lacanian manifesto in white men's fragile masculinity, or a JJ Abrams puzzlebox that's all set up a...

Merry Christmas simps!  While our Patreon subscribers will be treated to the much teased Batman Returns discussion like good little girls and boys, you freeloading plebs get a lump of coal in your shit stockings. But isn't every lump of coal capable of being a diamond — or at least an insanely horny and stylistically over-the-top curio of Millennial childhood at the end of history? To celebrate th...

Nicole kind of liked this one. Stu did not. It's kind of a movie. It's about found families. It's about feelings. It's fine. It's just fine. It's smooth. It's the vaseline you smear over your baby groot funko pop before you jam it up your ass and it's so smooth you feel... nothing. Nothing at all.   If you enjoy the show please consider helping us out with a positive rating or review, subscribing...

The non-event Marvel film formula is perfected with Dr. Strange, a movie so perfectly smooth and spherical it's already become a fixture of neoclassical economics textbooks. All the pieces are here and they're all shiny and grey like a kitchen appliance. Join Nicole and Stu as they try and fail to talk about this movie and talk about everything around this movie, because there's nothing to talk ab...

A civil war brews on this very podcast as Nicole and guest Cathy Brennan square off against Stu over whether this movie is terrible, or merely kinda ok. We've got Steve Roger's not-gays, quasi-incest and age gaps, dubious character motivations, contrived plotting and a centerpiece action sequence that takes place entirely in a call of duty tutorial level, Nicole's insasiable lust for Chris Evans,...