Showing posts with label Marvel. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Marvel. Show all posts

Tuesday, April 19

Everywhere... Everything is Explained...

This is Michelle Yeoh in the very fantastic Everything Everywhere All at Once. In it she plays a mom,
and her story made me want to call my mom.   Courtesy of A24


This past weekend, a couple of my friends and I went to see Everything Everywhere All at Once. I went in knowing two things about it: The first was that the very talented and fantastic Michelle Yeoh was in it; and the second was that it involved the “multiverse.”

As the credits rolled, with tears trickling into my mask, I had a hard time discerning what was making me emotional. I say emotional because it wasn’t just one feeling, but a strange mix of several: joy, wistfulness, catharsis, yearning, hope.

Without giving too much away, the very simple gist of this maximalist, fantastic tornado of a movie is about the choice to exist, to fully live within the present moment. It’s about finding the beauty in our small, odd lives, even as we constantly compare what we have to our unfulfilled fantasies. The movie also examines how we take solace in the personal disasters we’ve narrowly avoided. But what makes Everything Everywhere All at Once so powerful is the multiverse, a dazzling antidote to the fact that real life these days feels like it’s been designed to blur and pummel our emotions into dullness.

What is the multiverse? A world full of endless potential; multiple parallel universes spinning in synchronicity; and the possibility of alternate, powerful, seemingly better versions of ourselves. At a time when a pandemic, wars, and political cruelty have become constant, inevitable presences in our daily lives, it’s the ultimate fantasy for this moment. And that’s not just because Marvel, the most powerful entertainment company in the world, has gone all-in and made the multiverse a cornerstone of its current storytelling.  READ MORE...

Tuesday, October 19

Chinese Film Beats Bond & Marvel


The biggest movie in the world right now is not the latest Bond film No Time To Die or even Marvel's Shang-Chi and the Legend of the Ten Rings.

It's a Chinese propaganda film about the 1950s Korean War, centred on a story of Chinese soldiers defeating American troops despite great odds.

In just two weeks since its release, The Battle at Lake Changjin has made over $633m (£463m) at the box office. This puts it far ahead of Shang-Chi's global earnings of $402m, and in just half the time.

It is set to become China's highest-grossing film ever.  Its success is good news for China's pandemic-affected film sector as Covid forced cinemas to shut and reopen multiple times.

It is even better news for the state, which experts say appears to have nailed a formula of making propaganda appeal to the masses.

But for Hollywood looking in from the outside, the immense popularity of a local film like this could mean even more challenges ahead as it struggles to gain ground in China - the biggest film market in the world.

Commissioned by the Chinese government, The Battle At Lake Changjin is just one of several nationalist films which have become big commercial hits in China in recent years.

In 2017, Wolf Warrior 2, about a Chinese soldier saving hundreds of people from baddies in an African warzone, raked in a record 1.6bn yuan ($238m; £181m) in just one week.

Lake Changjin depicts a brutal battle in freezing weather which the Chinese claim was a turning point in the Korean War - formally known in China as the "War to Resist US Aggression and Aid Korea".  TO READ MORE, CLICK HERE...