Woman of Letters

Saw that there X-Men movie. I’ve no idea what has come over me

I saw X-Men: Apocalypse. It was pretty decent. The nice thing about these X-Men movies is that some of the action sequences are genuinely fun to watch. For instance both this movie and the last one had brilliant scenes with Quicksilver–a guy who can go very very very fast–in which he zips around and reorganizes reality by shoving people out of danger, moving bullets around, jumping around on top of exploding floorboards, while the rest of the world is caught between one breath and the next.

I still feel pretty torn about these superhero movies, because the amount of entertainment they offer is so mild that it almost doesn’t seem worth the $11. Like, they’re not actually a bad time, but in the end you’re left wondering why there should be so much hope and so much hype over something that’s ultimately a pretty empty experience. But I guess the answer is right there in the eleven dollars. I paid it. Big studios just want that eleven dollars. And they know that the way to do it is to produce something that’s mildly entertaining, every single time.

Other than that, not much is going on in my life. My book is coming out in two months! My feelings on this are really all over the place. I’m also moving to San Francisco in a month. I’m working on a few book. Life just feels very unsettled.

Comments (

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  1. davidperlmutter1

    I don’t support the live-action superhero movies on principle. They’re too rigidly written, acted and formatted and have none of the optimism or the progressive politics the genre is supposed to be about. I would rather support forms of this art that understand this implicitly and make it a part of its narrative drive. Such as in the comics, or in television animation. At least when my favourites aren’t put through horrific zombie resurrections just to make money, as has happened to one of them recently. But they’re Time Warner serfs as much as DC is, so that’s no surprise.

    1. R. H. Kanakia

      Are superhero comics known for progressive politics? I just assumed they were all as implicitly fascist as the movies are.

      1. davidperlmutter1

        Have you seen what they’ve been doing with superhero narratives in television animation recently? Anti-corporate prog politics in action, despite and perhaps because of its heavily corporate origins. My own supe fiction drinks very deeply from that particular well.

        Such as the Powerpuff Girls, as I eluded to in my previous post, at least in their original superior definitive version, not the current one. And, more recently, shows like Steven Universe.

        Keep in mind that superhero comics were the creation largely of lower-class ethnic men responding in part to a largely WASP establishment. So to a certain extent they’ve always had that bias. And they’ve only kept it up, in subtle ways, over the years. Most notably with the new Muslim Ms. Marvel.

        1. R. H. Kanakia

          I haven’t seen either of those! The last superhero cartoon I saw was X-Men: Evolution. I definitely remember the original Powerpuff Girls being pretty lefty and certainly not at all fascist.

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