Marvelous! Or, The Death of Cinema

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 slightly shorter and substantially more entertaining!   Production by Miguel Tanhi. Art by Zoe Woolley. Follow us at @MarvelousDeath for updates! If you enjoy the show please consider supporting us by leaving a rating or review on your preferred podcast distributor. 

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 there more going under the hood with the movie IMDB users once rated the greatest ever made?   Production by Miguel Tanhi. Art by Zoe Woolley. Follow us at @MarvelousDeath for updates! If you enjoy the show please consider supporting us by leaving a rating or review on your preferred podcast distributor. 

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 culture with an iron fist almost sunk out of the gate - a conversation much livelier than its subject.    *Nicole's power goes out   Production by Miguel Tanhi. Art by Zoe Woolley. Follow us at @MarvelousDeath for updates! If you enjoy the show please consider supporting us by leaving a rating or review on your preferred podcast distributor. 

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 film's confused politics as it tries simultaneously to critique the military-industrial complex while celebrating American empire and exceptionalism at the close of the Bush Era.   Produced by Miguel Tanhi. Cover art by Zoe Woolley.