It's a Traumedy. Did I just coin that portmanteau? Because it's damn good, if I do say so myself.

I think season 2 is even better, but man the Christmas episode is just DIRE. Hope you keep enjoying!

I've tried a couple times but keep bouncing off of it. I just don't like the way the show is paced and how every line is yelled. Feels a little too self serious at times and I often feel that yelling is used to substitute substance in some dialogues. The cast is great and it's a well made show for sure, but I've determined it just isn't for me.

That being said, I think casting Ebon Moss-Bachrach aka 'Cousin' Richie as Ben Grimm is a great choice.

Project #38: The Big Sick

Something for the Valentine's Day of it all. It's a dramatic romance movie with a comedian in one role, but I just can't call it a Rom-Com because most of the things that happen aren't cute or fun. But it feels honest, even for a dramatization.

And it has one of the best 9/11 jokes of all time, which probably can't be part of a rom-com either.

It was enjoyed and hopefully sits in the back of his head for his next relationship and the importance of obeying his father. I'm kidding.

Fun stuff.

I’ve just finished Obi-Wan Kenobi, and I’ll bullet-point some thoughts.

• Ewan McGregor is a treasure and his take on this character is by far the best thing to come from the prequels, and it’s nice to see him play it in a story that’s actually well-told and interesting.
• I kinda wish the Star Wars shows weren’t so packed full of references to the animated shows. Grand Inquisitors and Bo-Katan and well, tel he various other things from Rebels I know will appear in Ahsoka when I finally get to it. It all feels even more homework-dependent than people criticize the MCU for.
• It was hard to feel any sense of tension from the final episode even though it was technically full of tense moments. Vader won’t defeat Obi-Wan. Rena won’t kill Luke. Leia will return home. All of these climactic and visually exciting and technically suspenseful moments are heavily robbed of much of their weight because the outcome was given to us nearly fifty years ago. Which leads me to…
• Star Wars really needs to stop living in the past, but I get it - their fans won’t let them. All of these shows exist inbetween stories that already have a beginning, middle, and end, and often feature characters that also have a beginning, middle, and end. Star Wars is a vast universe that could go anywhere, do anything. But rather than explore what happens next, they’re stuck spelunking around in what already happened.
• But overall, very solid show. Kid Leia is fantastic, and she and Obi-Wan have a really strong chemistry that makes their interactions engaging. Kumail Nanjiani (sic) is always a joy, and hearing Zach Braff do a good enough Seth Rogen that I thought he actually was Rogen is impressive.
• But I’m ready for Star Wars to move ahead. The future is wide open. You don’t have to be scared of it because your hyper-critical fans are. Give them a great story about what happens next in Star Wars, and they just might appreciate it.

These are all really good points. Star Wars really needs to move the timeline forward. The only stories I’ve liked from the “past” were Andor and Rogue One, and they treat the story like something that is happening around them, not gospel.

Go forward, and move on from the Skywalker family.

Some buddies and I decided to go see Madame Web last night.

Completely mind boggling “movie”. An 80 million dolllar The Room. The audience was there to see the trash though. Laughing and clapping at the absurdity, so it was quite a fun experience. I have no idea what anyone working on this thought, it is truly and absurd movie, with a bonkers story, characters that are so flat it's debatable as to whether they have 1 dimension, a laughable script, and a villain who's entire dialogue appears to be ADR.

I forget where I said it, but if you can’t take a female-led take on the Spidey franchise and make at least an inoffensively bland but competent movie less than a year after Barbie hit theaters, you don’t deserve to work in Hollywood.

This could have been the easiest billion dollars ever made. Sex and the City but with web-slingers. Boom, money please.

Instead you get…this. It’s such a shame.

I wonder if they'll be suckered (again) into putting it back in theaters in a couple months.

What if I told you

This is just one of the infinite baffling choices made in this movie.

Okay Morpheus, just gimme whichever pill puts me in the version of the matrix where this movie is good.

I just don't understand why they had Dakota Johnson, an actress who genuinely resembles the way Jessica Drew has been drawn for basically her entire existence, and then instead of making a Spider-Woman movie, they say "Remember the old lady in the weird chair who gave Spider-Man cryptic advice and annoyed him so much he screamed at her in the 90s cartoon? What was she like as a young woman?".

Like - seriously - Jessica Drew was RIGHT THERE. You could even keep the angle of "experienced adult has to protect teenage girls from an evil Spider-Man who wants to kill them". And Sony can clearly use Drew - she was in the second Spider-Verse, after all.

I just don't understand why Madame Web. She was never intended as a lead character, and the only thing that was ever genuinely interesting about her was that she was voiced by Stan Lee's wife Joanie in the 90s cartoon. Otherwise, she was always kind of a stock "frustratingly cryptic clairvoyant who sends the hero on a quest" type of character.

Sony has no idea what they're doing. They need to either stop and just let their Animation division have sole control over their non-MCU Spider-Man films, or actually get someone on board who has the faintest clue as to what these characters are.

No, I haven't seen Madame Web and I don't plan to. Even though really, since I've seen the trailer, haven't I seen Madame Web? I mean really.

I kind of felt that way when I first saw the trailer.
Later that night I woke up in a cold sweat from a nightmare where Wizkids was putting out a Madame Web Gravity feed.

Does anybody here have any good ideas for a decent, above average MCU tv series they'd like to see made? The MCU is losing me. Not that it matters.

Misty Knight and Colleen Wing.

The idea I had the other day was that we need less “fate of the world” hero stuff and more “procedural.”

Tidge and many of the folks here said Misty and Colleen, and I love that. Especially if it’s basically “Cagney and Lacey: MCU.”

She-Hulk did that, and it’s still a crime she got canceled.

But give me a romcom. Give me a buddy cop or gritty cop show (other than Misty and Colleen, in a few months how about Bishop and District X?). A sitcom. Medical drama.

Take the MCU and push it through the various iterations of tv genre.

I will say that if you haven’t watched it yet, Hawkeye is really good.

I definitely think we need more street-level (relatively) low-stakes MCU stuff for the small screen. That's a huge part of what made Echo so good. At its core, it was about Maya reforging a connection to the Choctaw community she was ripped out of as a child and reclaiming her identity from Kingpin. High personal stakes, but low "galaxy-ending threat" stakes.

I too hope to see more She-Hulk. I love what we got, but I can admit that it was not the best it could be. But comedy shows rarely ever are in their first season. A second season could really strengthen what made the show great while working out the kinks. That and we just need more of the character. She's fantastic, and Tatiana Maslany nails it. Plus, my ideal episode of She-Hulk hasn't happened yet: Howard the Duck hires She-Hulk to represent him in immigration court, trying to fight deportation.

As for new projects I'd like to see? Some day, once the MCU's version of the X-Men are established, I'd like to see the New Mutants done justice, and I think they'd work better as a series than a movie. Dani, Rahne, Sam, Roberto, they deserve better than to be trapped in an insane asylum being tortured into becoming super soldiers somehow or whatever that movie's premise was (refused to see it, love the characters too much).

I know that Hank and Jan might be a bit persona non grata after Quantumania (I hope I used that correctly), but I'd still like to see a mini-series period piece exploring one of their earlier adventures. We've seen the 40s in the MCU, and depending on if you still count Agents of SHIELD (I do), we've seen the 50s and the 70s, but I think we could stand to see some more of the 80s.

I know I said that Star Wars needs to move ahead and tell new stories, but it feels different with the MCU because there's a lot of ground that could be covered, and not just in a "What If" sense. We know that Hank and Jan had a good stretch of heroism under their belts before Jan vanished into the Quantum Microverse Realm. Show us some of that. At least one adventure.