150: Against Rewriting Roald Dahl’s Books

Welcome back to across the movie I presented by Bullwerk Plus. I am Arrow, Sunny Bunch, Culture Editor of The Bullwerk. I’m joined as always by list of Rosenberg Gov of the Washington Post, Peter ceremon of Reason magazine. Alyssa Pieter, how are you?

I am Danny.

I am happy to be talking about movies with friends.

First up in controversies and non traverses. Rolled Doll’s literary corpse has been defiled, at least that’s how it seems given the fact, they copyright holders puffin, books, and Netflix, which bought the rights to, like, everything, every every roll doll thing. They have decided to rewrite the British author’s class works to make them more palatable for the sensitivity readers who pose as librarians in today’s public schools. Doll has long been a controversial figure because of, you know, the antisemitism. It’s a thing with him.

But his books are beloved by generations of kids, particularly the weird ones who feel a little outcast because there’s always been bikiness to them a little weirdness, a little cruelty. God knows he wouldn’t want to expose anything anyone to that sort of thing today. Now, would we So Puffy and Netflix have taken the hatchet to his books, a ghostous group, the corpulent little piggy who gets stuck in a liquid chocolate pipe after ignoring Willie Wonka’s commands to stay away from River. Is no longer fat. He’s just enormous.

Apparently, that’s better. Wouldn’t want to give any of the, you know, obese kiddos out there anymore of a complex. Mattilda no longer reads Joseph Conrad or Redyard Kiplink to colonialist, you know. And instead, she she dines with Jane Austin and the grapes of wrath, Kabi John Steinbeck. Here’s the change that sent me over the edge.

Frankly, it’s just right over the edge. In the witches, a little boy’s grandmother warns him that, quote, you can’t go around pulling the hair of every lady you meet. Even if she is wearing gloves, just you try it and see what happens. And, quote, That passage now reads, quote, besides there are plenty of other reasons why women might wear wigs and there’s certainly nothing wrong with that. End quote, because, you know, we wouldn’t want to other the differently scout.

As my colleague, Charlie Sykes noted in his newsletter on Monday, this wholesale boldularization, that’s a fun word. Of the classic text by the publisher is the work of sensitivity readers who hail from something called the Inclusive Mines, which is a collective for people who are passionate about inclusion and accessibility in children’s literature. You know, the my favorite sort of person. The counterargument to my annoyance is that doll’s work has been changed in the past. Things like references to the Yupalupas coming from the darkest heart of ago been taken out and and that sort of thing.

And look, one a a, I think that sort of stuff is dumb too. But also b, there is a qualitative difference between an author doing that sort of revising and write holders doing it on a much larger scale after the author’s death. Another counterargument is, hey, you know, this is what happens when you extend copyright forever. We gotta get rid of copyright. I don’t know, maybe, but also if they were in the public domain, you’d have much more of this wholesale revision, not less.

And you know what? Fine. Fine. Maybe a nice compromise here is that, you know, if you release a newly revised version of a book like this, the previous edition in all the rights attendant to it, and to the public domain problem solved. Look, I don’t know, guys.

Maybe I’m just old fashioned. Maybe I it’s possible. But I missed the time when even a halfway literate person agreed that this sort of thing was at best gosh and at worst like an immoral desecration of art. I I don’t know. Don’t you?

Well, listen. Don’t you miss those better times?

Yeah. And also, I think that this sort of bolderization misses the point, which is that the deep nastiness of Rolled Doll’s work has nothing to do with sort of one off references or which books Matilda is reading and everything to do with the sort of a deep sort of sense of cruelty and unfairness at the heart of the stories themselves, and that’s what makes them great. Right? Rolled All’s books scared the hell out of me when I was a kid, and they were some of my favorite things to read. You know, the witches, for example, which has the, you know, the really egregious example of editing you mentioned where you have a bizarre line about women’s, like, wigs and gloves and everything.

That’s a story about witches who have basically like an international plan to genocide children and they are competing like, the witches of different countries are competing against each other to see who can kill the most children. The happy ending involves the narrator being turned into a mouse and realizing that this means that, like, he won’t outlive his grandmother because he’s probably only gonna live another nine years, and she’s probably only gonna live another nine or ten years. He doesn’t really want anyone else to take care of him. So it’s like, they’ll both die when they’re, you know, at the same time and he’ll be a mouse forever, but they’ll have like done, you know, done a insurgency against the witches. Right?

I mean, Charlie in the Chocolate Factory is a book about a, you know, desperately poor child who is thrust by the totally capricious and insane whims of an incredibly rich man into the company of just these awful other children from, you know, terrible families. You know, Matilda is a story about a child who is sort of basically unwanted and unloved until she, you

know,

meets someone who helps her understand her specialness. I mean, these are very much books that are that are not built around, you know, building up readers’ self esteem or even necessarily sort of identify vacation with the characters, but are about introducing the idea that the world can be cruel and disgusting and unbeatably unfair and that what you have going for you is sort of your wits and your gumption. And, you know, they are they can be really upsetting. I mean, I remember the the original Illness illustrations in the witches scared the hell out of me when I was a kid. I mean, the, like, the illustration of the the ray band which is rotting face frighten me so much that I literally had a post it note over it in the book because the book scared me.

That image made you know, gave me nightmares. But I found the, you know, the tension and the stakes and the creativity of it, magnetic. And so I wanted to read it over and over and over again, but also to make You know, I made the part of the book that I couldn’t handle bearable on my own terms even as I I was allowing it to challenge me as a reader in other ways. And, you know, I think that, you know, a healthy diet of kids’ books is never gonna be one thing. Right?

I mean, there are gonna be stories with genuinely happy endings. There are going to be, you know, they’re gonna be the Hermione Granger’s the literary world who, you know, are smart and grew up and figure out how to be pretty. But there gonna be parts of life that are dark or unfair or upsetting, and dolls books are a really perfect early encounter with that. And the idea that you need to clean up these books around the edges strikes me as a double failure of literary chip because you’re defacing the text, but you also are demonstrating that you don’t understand that the nastiness of the stories is what makes them powerful. Right?

It’s, you know, it’s not just that you’re essentially committing an act of vandalism. But you’re demonstrating an ignorance of the importance of the work in the first place. And I just find that unbelievably disappointing. Those books were you know, dolls books, and not just his books, but his memoirs, you know, boy and going solo, which are great, and I highly recommend to anyone who, you know, hasn’t read those real life stories because they give you a real sense of where where roll dolls coming from. If you don’t understand the work and what makes it great, you shouldn’t be the steward of it, and it’s just incredibly disappointing.

Peter, what

I find most weird about this, most strange about it, is is the the real the insistence of making everything kind of line up with the very, you know, flash in the pan, like, here is the modern notion of what is acceptable and what is not. I mean, this this this idea that we need to protect modern readers from the sensibilities of Rolled Doll, strikes me as less about kids and more about again the, like, librarians, the the sensitivity readers, the the angry scholes on good reads who get worked up about this sort of thing.

Yeah. So I I agree with your your colleague, Charlie Sykes, that this is an act of literary vandalism. But even more specifically, I think it’s a kind of ideological vandalism. That is born out of a very specific worldview. One that is eliminationist in its own way.

Right? And and we hear sort of from a a lot from the people who are sort of sensitivity reader types or defenders of that that are about eliminationism. But this is this is an elimination of past perspective. And it is and it has a very particular kind of goal here, which is that it seeks to get rid of the idea of bodily discomfort or even mental discomfort with one’s own body. These changes to to these works are largely perhaps entirely I haven’t liked on a couch, but but largely about issues related to body image, unwanted or unchosen body types or body features.

And the idea that underlies a lot of these changes is that we wouldn’t want a book to in any way suggests that someone or even not just someone like some creature can in some sense be ugly or or or because of their particular bodies, because of the specific features or physical characteristics. We wouldn’t want any kind of body characteristic to be, in some sense, unpleasant or scary. Right? Because to suggest that in this worldview is to suggest that, like, even in the context of a story about genocidal witches. Right?

Just a totally fantasy story, there also is about a a a a set of characters that a isn’t real and b is totally awful. And, like, we’re supposed to understand that they’re totally awful. In the context of the story that’s the point of it, that might make someone anxious or uncomfortable about their own body.

And

the idea is that we then that somehow protects children because that that keeps them from being anxious or uncomfortable about their own body. And I just think that idea is really deeply mistaken. Because it assumes that the way to make kids more comfortable with their physical selves is to shield them and to hide them from anything that is unpleasant or un satellite. Right? And it’s it’s a sort of, oh, you know, we we don’t want kids to ever get dirt on them or or get any germs because that’s how they’re gonna be kept from getting sick.

Right? It’s that idea except for sort of mental health about your body. Except it turns out that the kids were most resilient about, you know, germs and about sort of you know, getting sick, are the kids who’ve had a lot of exposure to stuff when they’re kids? Like, that’s, like, exposure. Not always, you know, in super intense amounts.

Obviously, some things are not appropriate for three year months or for six year olds or for ten year olds. But consistent exposure to both to to the physical stuff and maybe make you a little bit sick sometimes, it is a little bit dirty, and also to ideas, to to this notion that in fact, there is unpleasantness in the world. That in fact sometimes you might be upset with yourself or see something that is upsetting. Exposure to that idea breeds like a a kind of resilience rather than rather than protects them and and and keeps them safe. And so I think even if you sort of take the idea seriously that what we want from kids is for them, you know, to to feel good about their bodies and to not be made to be deeply upset and, like, we we we obviously want people who, like, don’t aren’t super neurotic about that sort of thing, and who feel comfortable in their own skin.

That is a good thing to want in the world. But if that’s your goal, then this is a terrible way of going about it in addition to being just totally you know anti art and stupid about how literature works. But

if I can suggest one more thing, I suspect that some of the discomfort here is not just sort of sensitivity readers, whatever. But parents who are gonna be reading this stuff out loud. And, you know, to take us away from doll for a second towards another set of books that are both considered classic and somewhat problematic, I have been reading some of the Laura Ingalls Wilder little has had in the Prairie books to my four year old. And you know, there’s stuff in there that I don’t necessarily feel super comfortable saying aloud and having and reading them aloud. And there’s stuff in there that she is not entirely emotionally prepared for her.

And so reading those books loud to her has been a sort of editing on the fly experience. Right? And I’m sure we’ll read the books more than once, but you know, I for example, I’ve been leaving in a lot of the prejudiced things that the main characters, parents, and other adults say about Native Americans. In part because some of the really interesting moments of tension in the book come when you see, you know, Laura, the main character and narrator, kind of sensing the weakness in her parent’s logic or seeing things that are wrong. And, you know, I think it’s useful for her to her my daughter or to be starting to learn, like, adults aren’t always right.

Sometimes they’re narrow or they’re afraid of things that they shouldn’t be and that, you know, questioning that is valuable. On the other hand, there are you know, incredibly like bigoted terms for for black people that show up in the novels. And I’m bolderizing those a little bit in part because I don’t wanna say them and she’s not quite old enough for us to have a conversation about the history of that language and where it comes from. And so, you know, I think that to a certain extent, you know, it’s not like a kid who’s never read Charlie in the chocolate factory before is gonna, like, know in advance that and have fully formed feelings about this. I suspect there are parents who don’t wanna read some of this stuff aloud.

And so the, you know, it’s an attempt to whitewash away. Their discomfort, but I think that as a parent, it’s a really useful exercise to be able to say, am I comfortable saying this out loud? Can I explain this to my kid? Am I confident enough to talk to them about you know, why the author might have done that, this, or why a character might have done that, but but why we don’t? And so I think for, you know, it’s not just good for kids to have encounters with nasty characters, nasty stories, nasty ideas, but it’s good practice for parents to build the muscles of being able to have those conversations.

Howard Bauchner:

I do think there Yeah. That that like, that’s a good point and that there’s there is something here that is the editors are in some sense trying to do some of the work of parenting for the parents here. And they’re trying to do it in a sort of generalized and sort of and centralized way, you know, that I don’t think makes any kind of sense. I suspect that I am not the only person, maybe certainly not who was a red to a lot as a kid, maybe even not the only person on this podcast who discovered as a like a teenager, who some of the books that I’d been read to as a kid, like the parents were not reading me the exact words that were in the book. They were making additions.

They were, you know, they were making little changes. And I think that’s totally fine. That is that is the responsibility of parents to make those decisions and to figure out when they’re they’re gonna do it and and when they’re not. But it it seems bizarre to me to think that the the, you know, some sort of commission on what’s okay for kids should be doing this to roll doll rather than, you know, each individual parent or set of parents?

The a friend of mine joked on Twitter that, you know, the the real danger here is that we’re gonna teach kids that people who are ugly on the outside aren’t necessarily ugly on the inside. You know, that’s a that’s a real that’s a real concern. And, like, the joke here obviously is that that’s not true. That’s not, you know, that that’s not true in real life. It’s really not even true in the books.

But it seems to be like, that is what people actually think. That is what that is what the the the sensitivity readers who have taken a hatchet to this book actually think that if you if you don’t tell, you know, if you don’t make it very clear to children that, like, you know, ugly people can be nice too, then, like, they will they will think I and look, as as as somebody who again grew up reading all of these books, I can assure you that children aren’t that dumb. They’re just they’re just not that dumb. And I think that is part of what annoys me the most about this is the assumption that that kids cannot handle complex ideas or emotions or even simple ideas and emotions and need to be to be protected from them. It just drives me it drives me bonkers, and it closes off so many avenues of discussion and learning.

And I, you know, this is just this is this is one of these things and, like, I’m sorry, one last. I really, really cannot. I cannot fathom. The writers out there. And there are more than a few writers out there who were like, what’s the big deal here?

This isn’t this isn’t a problem. The writers had a books all the times. Why why are we worried about this? You know? Those things are problematic.

Why should we defend them? And I’m sorry. Your Philistines, your Philistines, and you shouldn’t be you should be put in writer jail. That’s where you should be. I would if I would’ve put you in writer jail and never let you out, throw away the key.

Honestly, the greatest hard rolled doll ever did to me was leave me a bit early to disappointed that I couldn’t develop mental superpowers like Matilda.

I assumed if I stared at a card long enough, I would be able to read the other side of it. That’s from one of his short stories that is

about a man. Henry Sugar.

A man a man who learns how to cheat at gambling and, you know, he he gets everything his hard desire. Anyway, I don’t know. So what do we think? Is it a controversy or a controversy that Rolled Dolls, the jury corpse, is being defiled in front of us, Alyssa.

It’s obviously hugely controversial. And if Rolled Doll were alive, he would write a bitter short story in which all of these people were like physically deformed as a manifestation of their inner smallness. And they would deserve it.

What Alyssa said? I

mean, it’s obvious controversy. And I’m like, I I genuinely I I like I may as big a copyright hawk as you will find. And this sort of thing and, you know, taking the taking the doctor Seussbooks off the market because they you know, the the doctors who spoke that, like, four people have read in the last fifty years off the market because it might have been to fit somewhere. Like, if you do this, if a publisher does this sort of thing, you should lose copyright and and have it taken away from you and had it put in the public domain. I’m like, I’m they’re driving me to, like, radicalism on this.

It’s it’s It is it is disconcerting. Alright. Make sure to swing my boarder plus. For a chat about the state of the box office. And in part, it’s gonna be a desperate plea for me, for studios to please, for the love of God, put more kids’ movies out there.

We we need them. They’re just that’s we gotta teach the kids go to theaters. And now on to the main event. Ant Man and the Wasp. Quantum Mania, it’s the latest episode in the ongoing MCU TV and theaters and on streaming and probably, I don’t know, videos on your phone.

Saga. Paul Rad is back at Scott Lang, who is trying to reconnect with his daughter, Cassie, whom he lost five years with during the blip. You know, when Thanos swiped out half of existence, that that keeps kinda coming up, but nobody really wants to deal with it, whatever. Scott Cassie, the WOS who’s played by Evangeline Lilly Hank Pim, who’s played by Michael Douglas and Janet Bendine, who’s played by Michelle Feifer. They all get sucked into the quantum realm, which is the realm kind of beneath the subatomic particles.

I guess it’s like within the subatomic particles, I don’t know. They have to find their way out. That’s it. That’s the movie. Once there, they discovered that the quantum realm has been conquered by King.

He’s played by Jonathan Majors, and his henchman modoc who was sadly not voiced by Patton Oswald as as he was in the animated show that ran on Hulu. Unlike the previous two AM Man movies, this one is not really self contained. Right? It’s more integrated with the rest of the Marvel Cinematic Universe. This will serve as many people’s introduction to Kang, again played by Jonathan Majors.

He is set to be this cycle of Marvel movies big, bad. Yay, Kang. But for a movie that really only has one goal again, We’re trying or do you want people to know who this king fella is? It does a really sloppy job of that. Look, I watch all of Disney plus’ show.

Loki. So I have a pretty decent sense of Kain kind of in what he’s up to, all the timeline, pruning, and all that. But this movie does an absolutely terrible job of explaining that to people. I, like, genuinely, I’m curious if anybody can understand what he is actually up to and why there are so many kinks at the in the in the mid credit sequence and, like, what he is doing when he shoots the blue things out of his hand because that’s what he has been reduced. And we’ve reduced this big world universe terrifying villain to just like another random villain who shoots colors out of his hands and makes people disappear.

I could forgive all of this if the movie actually, you know, look good. But like Wakanda forever, It’s immediate MCU predecessor. This movie looks terrible. It’s half finished. It’s entirely weightless.

It’s too dark. There’s always been an unreality to these movies, of course, and there’s so much CGI, it’s always hard to tell. But, you know, something really did happen during the pandemic that set every FX house back by, like, fifty percent quality wise, like, every non Avatar CGI movie that has come out in the last year has looked terrible, just completely terrible. Audiences seem to agree, quantum mania earned a b, which is tied with the dreadful eternals for the lowest MCU cinema score. And further cemented the fact that the wheels are kinda coming off the cart.

I don’t know. At least in terms of critical and audience appraisal, Commercially, they’re still fine. This movie earned more than its predecessor, which had earned more than the first Ant Man movie. Disney’s still making their money. I don’t know, Peter.

I’d like to think people are kind of tiring of this, but maybe they’re not.

Well, just on the question of whether people are tiring of this, I I think they’re not. I mean, if you look at the box office numbers for Antman and the West Qantamania, this open the opening weekend actually better than the previous two Antman movies. This is each one has done successively better and not by a little bit by quite a bit. I mean, the the first one opened to something like fifty or sixty million and this is opening around a hundred. Marvel claims at least that that is that that outpaces their expectations here.

This is the first big franchise movie of the year. Period and it it looks like people are ready to come back to the movies. The box office is up about fifty percent this year over the same period last year. So I I I don’t know that we have a lot of evidence that audiences are done with this. However, audiences do seem to care less.

And that cinema score for this and for other Marvel films, the the lack of legs on these movies, you know, sort of for people who don’t speak box office, that just means, like, how well they do in successive weeks after the opening week? Like, they do seem to be sort of diminishing And it’s partly because the the movies themselves since the pandemic have just not been as consistently good. And I think that this is a really this is this is a demonstration of the problems that the Marvel universe has had pretty much since Black Widow. The CG is really terrible and the story structures just don’t hang together. Meanwhile, the jokes kinda fall flat and feels really stitched together.

And there is just this incredibly strange sense that I have been, like, that that has struck me in nearly every Marvel film since Black Widow, which is that these movies seem to be entirely constructed in the editing room in a weird way and I feel like I’m watching a rough cut. Look, the rhythms are all just a little bit slightly off, especially in the jokey comic bits. It’s like they filmed ten different versions of every one of these scenes and you can just sort of see that they didn’t get the the edit and the timing right to make it quite natural Like no one is actually talking to each other because probably all of these actors were in Atlanta filming against a green screen. I guess this was filmed at Pinewood. Is that the one in London or the one in Atlanta?

Anyway, they’re all film they’re filming these things not in the same room together even in a lot of cases. Right? So it’s So you just get these really unnatural performances that they’ve stitched together in in editing and nothing

really feels

connected. Nothing nothing has a rhythm to it. And this is something that the the best Marvel movies, even when the effects are sort of whatever. Even when, you know, there’s kinda following the the three x structure formula that, like, every Marvel film, you know, follows. The early Marvel films had like a a kind of relentless naturalness to not naturalness, but like a a relentless quickness to them that felt lively and, you know, and and funny.

And the characters just sort of felt alive and, like, the whole thing felt, like, the movies felt like they were moving along. And this is just this is just a slog isn’t even right. It’s just everything feels really flat. And that’s particularly true for the first half of the film. All of the stuff where they meet the the the denizens of the quantum realm, the I don’t you know, the the guy who doesn’t have holes any he’s a go that you drink to to hear other languages because plot devices is sure Like, again, this is a you know, then there’s like a payoff to this in the third act because there there’s a the writer of this film is a Rick and Morty writer just actually, just like the writer of doctor Strange in the multiverse of madness.

Like, they’re leaning a lot on brick and mortar writers now as they’re moving into the multiverse here. It’s kind of interesting. And it just sort of feels like, well, that like, you can sort of see you can just see the seams in these jokes. You can see the setup sort of setting up. You could see the payoffs paying off.

Like, oh, yes. You’re you’re crossing off these these boxes. And then there’s just no there’s not a lot of pleasure in these movies anymore. Even even when they are trying, I think, to entertain and trying to be clever. And I think some of the stuff in this movie does work well enough in particular in the back half the the possibility storm sequence is pretty good on its own.

And if you just saw that, you’d think, hey, wow, there’s some clever stuff going on in this movie. All the stuff with with spoilers, Corey Stoll, as Modoc. Like, that’s a pretty good set of gags. And I do think actually the character of King isn’t all that well developed. But Jonathan Majors takes over the screen a lot of the time and gives a much more committed performance than the the writing of the character should allow for.

And I basically enjoyed the stuff with Jonathan Majors. And once he shows up, the movie became more engrossing for me. More. I will say. But the whole thing just just comes across as kind of flat and not quite sure of itself and And again, like, it’s like, oh, we know what we need to do.

We have need to have the you know, we know, like but we there’s no sort of, like, joy in exploring this world. It’s just box checking. There’s a there’s a a scene in the beginning of the second act, in which our characters, some of them, run into a house that is living that, like, walks around and also has, like, cannons on its arms. And it’s just kinda there in the background. It’s like, oh, I guess, how’s their alive with a chute here?

And then they they come in for the big action scene at the end. And just imagine how strange and weird people. Imagine what Rodolphe would have done with that idea. Right? Like like imagine how bizarre and, like and and weird that world would have been in the hands of

Imagine imagine what Hey, Yamyaya and Zaki would done?

Yes. In the hands of a creator who actually cared about exploring the bizerness of the world that has been created. I think a movie like that could overcome a lot of c g problems if they actually demonstrated some commitment to and interest in the the quirks of the premise. But this movie isn’t interested in any of those things. It’s just sort of marking time until we get to the setups for the next set of Marvel movies.

And that has become the big problem in phase four or phase five or whatever in here post pandemic, is that everything just feels like it’s just well, what can we do to get you to the part of the movie where we’re gonna give you a commercial? For the next set of movies. It’s not terrible. I’ve seen many worse movies. It’s not very good either.

Can we just focus on Modoc for a second because Modoc is, I think, representative of everything that is wrong visually with this movie. I understand the concept of what they’re going for with Murdoch. Here. Right? So in in the movie, Corey Stall, who in the in the first Ant Man movie, got shrunk down to below the quantum realm he’s he’s here now.

Right? So he becomes Motok. And the idea here is like they’ve taken his face and stretched it out wide as if that was, like, to make it fit with the, like, horribly misshapen form of MODOC who’s essentially a ball. He’s, like, basically, a floating ball with, like, tiny little baby legs and baby arms. He’s he’s wasn’t a big head.

Bouncing heads from spirited away. Right? Like, but with shunts.

And, like, I I get the idea of what they’re going for when they reveal Corey Stoll’s face. They pull back like a, you know, they pull back a a metal guard and it’s it’s Corey Stolt’s face and it’s all stretched out and it looks weird. But it looks like the first draft of that idea. It looks like they took a photoshop of a of a photo that was in the wrong resolution and slapped it on with a perfectly realized CGI body and it it just it doesn’t look right. It looks half done.

And that is this whole movie. This whole movie looks half done. I it’s driving me bonkers. This thing probably cost two hundred million dollars to make. The Chorus Del

Face looks like the effects on a BBC sci fi show from about nineteen ninety eight.

Total if that I mean, I like, they would they would know better than to try something this bad probably. I don’t know. Alyssa, when did you make of Ant Man and the Lost Quantumania?

I did not like this movie. And look, my exhaustion with the Marvel Cinematic Universe is a matter of sort of extensive to the point of being boring record for a long time listeners of the show. But I think this is the movie that really crystallized for me. Just sort of how exhausted and confused I am by this whole enterprise. I was like, I can’t keep track anymore whether this is a series about the multiverse or about quantum realm or about timelines or how all of those things relate to each other?

Wait.

I question can I interrupt I’m sorry? I interrupt real quick? Did did you watch Loki all the way through

this? Yes. And I don’t understand — Okay. — I just I don’t get it. Like, I I mean, I’m not an idiot, but there are a lot of other things that I have to spend my brain power on, and so I can’t really keep up with all of this stuff.

And the thought of trying to is exhausting. The idea that I would have to go back and watch Loki again to understand this. It’s just like, no. I, you know, I I get paid a certain amount of money to keep track of this stuff, but not actually enough to make me care. And So I’m just exhausted trying to keep up with what is even going on here.

And, you know, the can just already seem so choisily executed and inconsistently powered and that, you know, I’m not I don’t feel like I’m excited to know what’s going on. Right? It’s like, okay. They’re bad guys. They’re coming in thunder and lightning like a joke except you’re not Henry the fifth.

Okay. Fine. And so I’m just I am tired, but also just the plot of this movie is so lazy when there is a streamlined version of this that lets you get much deeper into the characters, which is, you know, skip all of the like, if you eliminate the idea that Jana Van Dine knew, like, who Kang was and what he was capable of. And he was just somebody she knew in the multiverse. And so a version of this movie where Scott and Cassie spend you know, two thirds of the movie with the rebels, like getting to know them and knowing that there’s some sort of antagonist out there.

And like,

Casier

gets to have an actual argument with her father about, like, why getting involved and these sorts of things is, like, a good idea. And he gets convinced. Like, he actually you know, gets convinced by an argument, and we get to know these rubbles as something other than, like, ticks. And then the other half of the movie, you cut the Bill Murray Kim, Mio. But where the person that Janet is taking Hank and Hope to meet is Ceng, who’s just like this scientist she knew in the multi verse.

And so you get a like, there they spend their two thirds of the movie hanging out with a version of Kang who’s, like, introducing you to the sort of scientist backstory of the character. He’s really excited to meet Hank Pim. They sort of have this adventure And then you have the heel turn at, like, the two thirds point in the movie where the two stories meet back up again. And you’ve gotten to know Kang much better as a character. And Scott and Cassie have actually had, like, their bonding experience and, like, their intellectual argument and their arc.

And then they have to, like, overcome their confusion and, like, come back together and deal with him in the third act. Like, that to me seems like it would have been a much more useful movie for what the Marvel Cinematic Universe is trying to do, and also just a much cleaner movie. The alternative also is that hope doesn’t come back for Scott and Ken just kills him. Right? Like if you you know, they actually put the meat behind the, like, I don’t have to win.

We both just have to lose. And, you know, you have this sort of dour story actually lead up to something emotionally impactful. But that also preserves the sense of kang is quite powerful as opposed to someone who can be like done in by the Ant Man team and some random like super genius ants that just show up in the cult launch I’m real. I mean, this movie’s stupid. Like, it’s just it’s like It’s like they’re playing Mad Libs with a movie.

Right? It’s like they just like, okay, a guy who’s really interested in holes and also Ant. And a revolution because we have, like, a woke teenager. It is called Ant Man. So

you gotta have some ants in it somehow.

Oh, this is here’s no. But here’s here’s the thing though. Here’s here’s the thing, like, Ant Man’s an inherently vaguely ridiculous character. And, like, you can have ant man stuff, or you can have the kang stuff. But trying to put them together just doesn’t work.

It it it clashes too badly. Yeah.

The the the mix of vibes is very weird. Again, I think if you had sort of a half of the movie where, like, you’re getting to know this alternate kang is, like, someone who Jana Vandai and Trust who’s interested in the science, like, that may be gets you a little further at least I mean, putting aside just the inherent clash of the tones, that at least gets you a little closer to understanding the idea of the kang’s is like real variants, but in a way that add up to it go here on hold. Maybe maybe I don’t know. Like, was I what what was I supposed to feel about, like, the whole council of kings, mid credits sequence? I don’t know.

That stuff just like, it’s both baffling and not intriguing.

You were supposed to feel excited for the Kang dynasty. Avengers, the King Dynasty, which is coming. It’s on the schedule. And so this is part of it. Is this movie and, like, this this franchise now relies on extra textual knowledge.

Like, they the they’re it’s not just that you have to know everything that has happened in all thirty one. I think we’re at thirty one movies plus I don’t know how many episodes of television at this point. Yes. There’s a lesson of making Bekaika. She’s very happy to have to do all of this face on the podcast here.

It’s not just that you have to follow every movie in every episode of every television Show. And also, it helps to help to know a lot about the comics. It’s also that these movies rely on viewers to know what the schedule is for the next two or three years’ worth of movies. And they are rolling out information that is designed to to tease people who follow the announcements of what movies are coming. And so when you see this, you see the the council of kings and the the Faroe king, and the other two I forgot with the other are are are named.

But like you see these kings who all have, you know, analogs in the comic books and you know that Avengers King Dynasty is coming and that Jonathan Majors gonna be around for a while. And also, you know, oh, wait, there’s gonna be a a Loki season two this year. Like, it’s not it’s not a movie that is about the thing that happens in the movie. It’s a movie that is two hours and five minutes of advertisement for the next several years of things, all of which will themselves as far as I can tell, just be advertisements for the next set of things. And I would, at some point, like one of these movies to stop and be about itself, And in fact, the early Marvel films that was what was great about them, even Avengers, which was the the the first one in particular, which was the culmination of all of the, you know, several years of stories and characters.

The first Avengers is a really a quite self contained film that tells a pretty discreet story about a bunch of people who come together fight off Loki. There’s a, you know, there’s aliens in New York. It’s like it’s just a basic ass superhero movie. And this is all like, I can basically follow this stuff more or less, although I I will say that, like, increasingly, I kind of appreciate the ending explained genre of of post at some of the geek sites. But again, that’s a problem that even someone like me who’s been reading comic book since I was eight years old, who’s seen nearly every m every minute of MCU production.

I haven’t seen miss Marvel. I’ve basically seen everything else.

Like,

every now and then I’m like, what is going on again? Did he who died? When? And the Anyway, there’s gonna be a lot more kings, guys. Get get ready for

more kings. Kings are coming.

Kang takes silver, will he destroy everything including the Marvel Cinematic Universe? Because if he does that, then I’m objectively broken.

So

what

Kain will do? Kain will destroy everything that Kevin Feige wants to erase from the the continuity, and also he will get rid of all of the actors whose contracts are up. Kang is not a plot device even. That’s the other crazy thing is we’re now in the realm of these things are not actual plot devices designed to tell stories. These things are designed to basically solve the production and IP issues that Marvel has tried to integrate X Men and the Fantastic Four into this universe.

I’ll tell you I’ll tell you what would save the MCU as Kang showing up with a billion dollar contract for Robert Downey junior. Saying, hey, can you just do these movies till you die? That would be that would be great for us. That would be that would be wonderful. Alright.

So what do we think? Thumbs up or thumbs down on Ant Man and the loss of quatamania, Peter.

It’s not actually that terrible. It’s just very flat. I’m gonna give this the weakest possible thumbs up despite my gripes

Like You are part of the pro you are part of the problem, Alyssa.

Thumbs down. Like, free jobs. Thumbs. Thumbs. Thumbs.

Thumbs to make more great movies with spike late. This is awful.

Thumbs down. Thumbs down. And we didn’t even talk about how this movie weighs Bill Murray having him be, like, a totally expository character just getting us from one scene to the next instead of, you know, having him be a central part of the movie or just doing something else entirely with his life. It is it is baffling to me why he is in this. There’s a lot of Canger about this.

I need a snickers Alright. That is it for this week’s episode. Make sure to tune into the bonus episode. On Friday, and we will be back. Next week with another one, make sure to share it with your friends.

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