MudMan

Gamora is definitely the straight man in Guardians. Suicide Squad is a lot less even. Idris Elba’s Bloodsport is played mostly straight, the humor is in interacting with everybody else, and the same goes for Rick Flag, Amanda Waller and arguably Ratcatcher.

I mean, they’re comedies, but they aren’t gag-a-minute comedies. Some characters are much more out there than others, but every one of them has some heart, a thing they want but can’t have and typically a tragic backstory. Guardians 3 in particular is such an oppressively sad movie. That goes for the Creature Commandos spinoff, too, which while keeping the tone is just trauma city.

How that balance works in Superman I don’t know. The original Reeve movie plays Krypton very straight, but also very 50s sci-fi. If there is a baseline for reality in that movie it’s definitely the Smallville segment in the middle, where they set the stakes for both mortality and the version of Americana that Donner sees Superman as representing. The Metropolis segments are just a conservative parody of 80s society mixed with an over the top cartoon. Supes is played straight, and Reeve manages to suggest there is a real person there, to his credit, but… I mean, the superheroing he does is taking cats down trees and giving out corny speeches about how “statistically speaking flying is the safest way to travel”. A thief clocks him with a crowbar over the head and it goes “boing-ing”, leaving him shaking. Had the cast misunderstood the assignment even a little bit we’d be in Adam West territory.

You think Reeve was “straightforward with moments of humor”?

Were we watching the same movie? When was the last time you sat down to watch it? I mean, it’s such a classic, you can barely analyze it as a movie anymore, but… I mean, Lex Luthor and his gang is fundamentally comic relief. Luthor steals nukes by having his hot assistant pretend to have a car crash while Otis changes the launch codes or whatever.

Gunn has suggested it is a big influence, and I can see how that tone is a challenge outside of the context of having seen the 78 film as a kid, but the notion that you’re going to outsilly the first Reeve movie in 2025 seems absurd. Unsure as I am about Guy Gardner’s bowl cut, the bar is at “MISS TESSMACHEEEER!” here.

I have heard about one and a half of these.

There are no longer gatekeepers, which means there are no longer promoters outside of narrowly defined online niches associated to specific brands or viral hits.

It… kinda sucks. I miss when we all heard about the same things. There were pros and cons to all the centralied control of dicourse, but man, do the pros sound increasingly better than the cons this century.

Pi and Requiem for a Dream as a one-two punch.

“Being smart is such a curse I’d rather get a lobotomy” is boring, self-serving and trite, but the Reefer Madness-level “drugs bad” thing in Requiem is unbearable and requires every character to be entirely nonsensical.

Trainspotting was four years old by that point. How critics let Aronofsky get away with it is beyond me. To this day the closest I’ve been from walking out of a movie theatre. The only reason I stuck around was it was in a festival and I was there with other people.