Marvelous! Or, the Death of Cinema

A little catch-up two for one episode as Stu and Nicole revisit Marc Webb's Andrew Garfield starring "Amazing Spiderman" films, the movies so bad they convinced Sony to bend knee to the Disney-Marvel imperium. We talk about how Marc Webb turned Peter Parker into a self-insert artsy film kid, how Garfield and Emma Stone have chemistry despite dating IRL, the complete failure of the JJ Abrams esque...

We always complain that these movies don't have enough sex or violence, so they gave us one with sex and violence. It's ok. Some of the humor is funny, some of it has aged badly. Has so much changed in just six years? It's a very 2010s movie. A very Reddit movie. We also talk about how TJ Miller is a freak and Morena Baccarin deserves better. Includes bonus Mario movie trailer live reactions (stu...

Stu gets out of pocket in this excerpt from our Patreon-exclusive bonus episode " We Need To Talk About Ezra ".   To listen to the full episode, wherein we discuss the ongoing melt down, messianic delusions and crime spree of DCU tentpole Ezra Miller, please subscribe to our Patreon . All bonus content is available at the $3 per month tier, with shout outs, credits, custom discord roles and other...

There are no more barriers to cross. All I have in common with the uncontrollable and the insane, the vicious and the evil, all the mayhem I have caused and my utter indifference toward it I have now surpassed. My pain is constant and sharp and I do not hope for a better world for anyone. In fact, I want my pain to be inflicted on others. I want no one to escape, but even after admitting this, the...

Twist ending: We didn't hate it. DC Jumps into the Cinematic Universe game ass first and Zack Snyder takes a second crack at Watchmen but with official superman and batman action figures. As we've said about cinematic universes: It makes the sum of it's parts weaker. A decent if overblown Batman vs Superman movie is buried under the unmanageable weight of a rushed Death of Superman movie and a ter...

In delaying their dark fate (i.e. watching the 3+ hour director's cut of Batman v Superman) once more, Nicole and Stu pre-game with Zach Snyder's big-screen adaptation of Watchmen, the definitive Alan Moore and Dave Gibbons anti-superhero comic once deemed unfilmable by Terry Gilliam. More than a decade and several loud, gray, and stupid movies later, how does Snydog's Watchmen hold up? Well, it's...

Modern dance. The RAF and Baader-Meinhoff. Chest vaginas. Human origami. Abject mothers. Metal rib hooks. Thom Yorke. Mennonites. Eating chicken wings. It's Suspiria (2018), a certified Nicole-core movie (one of her favorites actually) that arguably surprasses the legendary original and paves its own fucked-up way in the process. Is that controversial to say? Do you disagree and want to yell at us...

Double, double, toil and trouble, it's the first of our long teased two-parter Suspiria (1977) vs. Suspiria (2018) episode! On this edition of Watch Something Else, Nicole and Stu discuss Dario Argento's original Technicolor nightmare in all its bloody glory. With the color palette of a demonically possessed Disney movie and the gnarliest score ever recorded for a motion picture, 1977's Suspiria i...

This fortnight on Marvelous!, Nicole and Stu follow up Avengers 2: Joss Whedon Embarrassing Psychic Projection and finish out Phase Two of the Marvel Cinematic Universe with a smaller-scale movie where Paul Rudd plays a bug guy who steals. Like Iron Man 3, it's okay for inflight entertainment, but it's also the Marvel movie that shows just how controlling Feige and Friends are over the studio's pr...

In his follow up to the most reaction GIFed movie ever made, feminist filmmaker Joss Whedon buckles under his own ego and the studio mandated checklist Kevin Feige and co. needed him to fulfill in order to set up Phase 3 movies. This episode of Marvelous!, Nicole and Stu dissect Avengers: Age of Ultron, the divisive sequel to The Avengers where another Olsen twin and not Evan Peters team up with t...

After the success of Avengers, the MCU was burgeoning into a colossus, and Disney found itself in desperate need of Intellectual Property to enlist in it's conquest of popular culture. They take a risk: A cult director with a pedigree in sicko schlock, a far fletched cosmic setting, and a d-list cast of offbeat throwoffs including a talking raccoon and a tree. What did they get? A smash hit and a...

It's conspiracies and queerbaiting as we get to possibly the most disappointingly overrated and bafflingly well remembered of these movies so far. We discuss a conspiracy thriller without a thrilling conspiracy, the problems with green-screen action and quick-cut editing, how the film inverts the relationship between the US Gov't and post-war Nazis, the continuing hollowness of hollywood 'war on t...

Thor is back for another aimless, dull adventure in Thor 2: The Dark World. Why do they keep shoving Thor's sidekicks on screen with nothing to do? Why do all these movies have pale black-cad bad guys in big pointy black ships? How come Natalie Portman stops being a character twenty minutes into the movie? Did studio interference actually make this movie slightly less terrible? Is genocide only ba...

Nicole and Stu talk Iron Man 3, the most adequate MCU movie yet! It has the most OK action! The least bad politics! A less underused villain cast! It's everything you could ever possibly want in a movie you see on an airplane! Tune in for a in-depth analysis and scathing critique of a movie we both thought was "perfectly fine." Production by Miguel Tanhi. Art by Zoe Woolley . Follow us at @Marvelo...

It's time to take another break from charting the decline of the hollywood blockbuster to take a look at two more movies we love that you should watch instead!* In this episode Nicole and Stu discuss two movies about the monstrousness of the American Bourgeoisie, Bryan Yuzna's 'Society' and  Michael Lehmann's 'Heathers' both from 1989 the beginning of the end of history. We're talking imaginative...

Nicole and Stu discuss Man of Steel, the superman reboot hastily retrofitted into the genesis of WB and DC's 'Not-MCU' franchise. We talk about the exploitative and ill-conceived use of 9/11 imagery, the bizarre strain of gruesome horror running through the film, the failure of writers Nolan and Goyer to fit The Last Son of Krypton into their 'gritty realistic' Dark Knight formula, the enigma of d...

At last it comes to this. The terrible beast that tore a path of destruction across the cultural landscape and remade the rubble in it's own image, the ground zero for an era of industrially produced perfectly smooth franchise IP gangbangs. A decade after it's release, what do Stu and Nicole make of Marvel's The Avengers Assemble (not to be confused with 1998's The Avengers)?1 What can we say abou...

Nicole is simps over Chris Evans and his big feet, Stu is leads the crusade against body fascism, and a man dressed like a flag punches Hitler - It's Captain America: The First Avenger. Join us as we trace the MCU's retconned origins back to WW2 and we discuss the origin point of American Hegemony, the mythology of liberal imperialism, the genre's immanent inability to confront it's own moral cont...

Half of this movie is sexy ET without sex, half of this movie is Shakespeare in Space but without any drama. Nicole wants to know how this movie didn't kill the MCU in the crib. Stu wants to know why Kat Dennings is shilling crypto. The movie is bad. The podcast is good. It's the "Marvelous!" Thor episode.   Production by Miguel Tanhi. Art by Zoe Woolley . Follow us at @MarvelousDeath for updates!...

This is the inaugural episode of "Watch Something Else", in which we discuss movies that actually kick ass and recommend that you watch them.   This week (Bi-week? Fortnight?) Nicole and Stu take a partial look at the career of Paul Verhoeven, noted Dutch Christ scholar and sometimes filmmaker. We examine the theological themes, the Christian analogies, and the explicit sex and ultra-violence of s...

Nicole and Stu take a look at Iron Man 2, three action scenes in a trenchcoat pretending to be a movie. It's boring. It's meandering. It has a lot of plot threads that don't go anywhere. It's dumb as rocks and retreats from and muddles further whatever meager social commentary even the first film could muster. It's bad! So instead of watching this turd listen to our conversation about it, which is...

For our first excursion outside the realm of the MCU Nicole and Stu take a look at another 2008 movie. One that was even bigger than Iron Man, even more a reaction to the Bush era, and equally formative on the following decade's  blockbusters, in particular defining the style and tone of Warner Bros attempts to build a competing cinematic universe. Is it a neocon tract? Fascist apologia? Or is the...

He's big, he's green, and he's... remarkably boring. Also he can't have sex with Liv Tyler. In the pod's own troubled* sophomore outing, Nicole and Stu talk about 2008's almost forgotten The Incredible Hulk. We go over the film's production woes, the conflict between the studio, the director, and miscast star Edward Norton, its failures as a movie, and how the media franchise that now rules cultur...

Nicole and Stu start at the beginning with 2008's Iron Man. There was no plan. There wasn't even a script. An indie director on the come-up took a long-shot casting a burnt out has-been who's charisma and pathos single-handedly turned a mid-tier action film into a monster hit that would spawn a monstrous cultural behemoth. We take a look at the troubled production, Downey Jr's charisma, and the fi...