Marvelous! Or, the Death of Cinema

Iron Man 3, or An Achievement in Adequacy

Nicole and Stu talk Iron Man 3, the most adequate MCU movie yet! It has the most OK action! The least bad politics! A less underused villain cast! It's everything you could ever possibly want in a movie you see on an airplane! Tune in for a in-depth analysis and scathing critique of a movie we both thought was "perfectly fine."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. 

We Live in A Society: Society (1989) and Heathers (1989) [WSE #2]

It's time to take another break from charting the decline of the hollywood blockbuster to take a look at two more movies we love that you should watch instead!* In this episode Nicole and Stu discuss two movies about the monstrousness of the American Bourgeoisie, Bryan Yuzna's 'Society' and  Michael Lehmann's 'Heathers' both from 1989 the beginning of the end of history. We're talking imaginative weird creature effects, sick outfits, the rich feeding on the poor, loving our dead gay sons, culture presaging columbine and the era of stochastic violence, how Christian Slater plays the original 'we live in a society' joker guy, and more! 
 
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. 
 
*Or at least one that we love, and one that we like.

Man of Steel, or Saturday Morning 9/11

Nicole and Stu discuss Man of Steel, the superman reboot hastily retrofitted into the genesis of WB and DC's 'Not-MCU' franchise. We talk about the exploitative and ill-conceived use of 9/11 imagery, the bizarre strain of gruesome horror running through the film, the failure of writers Nolan and Goyer to fit The Last Son of Krypton into their 'gritty realistic' Dark Knight formula, the enigma of dumb-smart/smart-dumb guy auteur Zack Snyder, and much more! But hey, at least it looks like a movie...?
 
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. 

The Avengers, or Slouching Towards A Theater Near You

At last it comes to this. The terrible beast that tore a path of destruction across the cultural landscape and remade the rubble in it's own image, the ground zero for an era of industrially produced perfectly smooth franchise IP gangbangs. A decade after it's release, what do Stu and Nicole make of Marvel's The Avengers Assemble (not to be confused with 1998's The Avengers)?1 What can we say about writer/director Joss Whedon, male-feminist nerd icon turned pariah?2 What, in the end, does all this superhero stuff actually mean?3
Find out all this and more as we take a look at the movie that made the modern blockbuster, and cross the dark threshold into the world that Marvel made.
 
1-It's a perfectly adequate adventure movie
2-He's a pretentious dork
3-Tune in to find 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. 

Captain America, or The Empire Yassified

Nicole is simps over Chris Evans and his big feet, Stu is leads the crusade against body fascism, and a man dressed like a flag punches Hitler - It's Captain America: The First Avenger. Join us as we trace the MCU's retconned origins back to WW2 and we discuss the origin point of American Hegemony, the mythology of liberal imperialism, the genre's immanent inability to confront it's own moral contradictions, sperg out over period military tech and much more! 
 
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. 

Thor, or What If E.T. Was Sexy?

Half of this movie is sexy ET without sex, half of this movie is Shakespeare in Space but without any drama. Nicole wants to know how this movie didn't kill the MCU in the crib. Stu wants to know why Kat Dennings is shilling crypto. The movie is bad. The podcast is good. It's the "Marvelous!" Thor episode.
 
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. 

The Mad Dutchman: A Paul Verhoeven Retrospective [Watch Something Else #1]

This is the inaugural episode of "Watch Something Else", in which we discuss movies that actually kick ass and recommend that you watch them.
 
This week (Bi-week? Fortnight?) Nicole and Stu take a partial look at the career of Paul Verhoeven, noted Dutch Christ scholar and sometimes filmmaker. We examine the theological themes, the Christian analogies, and the explicit sex and ultra-violence of such films as Flesh + Blood, Robocop, Total Recall (briefly), Starship Troopers, and Nicole calls for a critical reevaluation of 2000's nearly forgotten thriller Hollow Man. I'd buy that for a dollar!
 
Paul Verhoeven will be back in "Mad Dutchman Returns", when (some day) we get around to discussing Showgirls and Benedetta.
 
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. 
 

Iron Man 2, or Three Action Scenes in a Trenchcoat

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.