Captain Marvel and The Rotten Tomatoes Scandal

Revenge of the Nerd Cultural Wars

There is something going on in the Marvel Cinematic Universe, also known as the MCU. It is an ominous dark cloud creeping across the land filled with the shill beasts, the SJW demons, the online media liars, and the Ultron dictator mouse house that controls the horizontal and the vertical as we unwittingly step into the censorship zone. What has come of us in this new world of cyber criticism? Can we express an opinion without being called names? Can we post a thought in the negative and not become fearful of being demonetized for producing an opposition video? Is this the silencing of a hundred voices who don’t follow the corporate philosophy of to not speak ill and only positive about our product? Such is the case for the upcoming Marvel film, Captain Marvel, that’s been produced and marketed by Disney.

Captain Marvel is the latest film from the MCU that will get its general opening on March 8. It will star Brie Larson as Captain Marvel, a figure with untold powers that apparently has no rivals. Captain Marvel was made to be a tie into the upcoming Avengers Endgame movie that’s scheduled for an April release date. Last year the MCU gave us Avengers 4 with the powerful being known as Thanos wreaking havoc on earth by eliminating half the population with just one snap of his finger aided by a set of infinity stones. At the end of Avengers 4, Nick Fury pulled out an old pager before he disappeared into the ether and as the camera slowly zoomed in, the emblem of Captain Marvel was on the pager. Fast forward a few months and we are being introduced to Carol Danvers aka Captain Marvel.

When Disney started marketing Captain Marvel, it had a 97% score of people interested with 3% of people not interested in seeing this movie on Rotten Tomatoes, an Internet film ranking site. As time moved forward, things started to change and not for the better. As of February 25, 2019, Rotten Tomatoes had Captain Marvel at a record low of 27% of over 45,000 people interested in wanting to see this film which meant that 73% of people were not interested in seeing this film. There were signs that these numbers were still heading down as the premiere date crept closer and closer. There were YouTube sites reporting on the steady rise of people not being interested in seeing the film on a daily basis. Ticket sales that had Captain Marvel forecast to make an estimated $168 million its first weekend in the beginning but that number too changed to a forecast of just $80 million dollars. There were reports where people were looking to get their money back following the controversial comments made by Brie Larson but they were denied a refund even though it was weeks ahead of the premiere date. Of the latest update on people not interested in seeing the film, one of the YouTube nerds, Geeks, and Gamers, decided to check in before closing down for the night and discovered that Rotten Tomatoes had removed the people not interested in seeing the film score. It was gone. The only thing that was left was just the people interested in seeing the film. Gone also were the negative comments. Who was behind this supposed independent service that the movie industry relied on to promote their films? Who initiated this coup-DE-tat of information obliteration? You have to first look at what caused this tumult with Captain Marvel and you didn’t have to look any further than it’s the star, Brie Larson.

Brie Larson is an actress not known for making big blockbuster films. She received A-List status after receiving an Oscar for her performance in the movie, Room, where she portrayed a mother held captive, along with her son, in a small room for several years. Although she is not known for it, she claims she is an advocate. I’ve personally have not seen her advocate on anyone’s behalf but I’m not tuned in to the 24/7 life of this woman. I find women like Emma Watson doing advocacy work on causes she believes in as she has taken positions on the things she holds an interest in like her work with the U.N. I do not know of anything Brie Larson has done but she claims she is an advocate for women. It is because of this, Brie Larson has taken up a position on the white male film critics.

At The Women in Film Crystal + Lucy Awards event of June 2018, Brie Larson stated, “ I do not need some 40-year-old white dude to tell me what didn’t work about A Wrinkle In Time. It wasn’t made for him.” You can see the speech in the clip below along with Dave Cullen’s running commentary that challenges her position. 

That speech became the proverbial thorn in the paw for more than just straight white men. Brie Larson had thrown down the gauntlet. It became the slap across the face heard across the world. Somewhere along the line, that speech was replayed over and over again immediately after the first trailer for Captain Marvel came out. The reviews of the initial trailer were met with a lackluster response. It did not pop. There wasn’t anything special to see. It was ordinary compared to other superhero type films. It was no Alita: Battle Angel. There wasn’t anything there to warrant a sense of the need to see the film but the initial hype had begun.

The ’40-year-old white dude’ speech had started to take hold. It began to take on a life of its own and people started to mind-meld the speech with the Captain Marvel trailer. The trailer also took on an air of becoming a feminist propaganda tool for identity politics with certain cringe-worthy dialogue Brie Larson was saying in the trailer and the flashing of H-E-R with HERO. Even some women had a problem with that. Soon, it was not just the white dudes who had had their fill of being bashed just for walking upright on this earth but there were also women who saw this as a reach that had no justification with the attacks on white dudes. And by extension, black dudes saw this as a foreshadowing of things that would eventually trickle down to them based on historical events. The white dudes had reached that last straw and weren’t going to be ‘Gilletted’ anymore.

As the Rotten Tomatoes audience score kept falling and falling, there were constant updates from YouTube bloggers like MechaRandom42, That Star Wars Girl, the aforementioned Geeks and Gamers, Nerdrotic, John Talks, Odin’s Movie Blog, and ComicArtistPro Secret, all who were driving the narrative of what was happening along with giving some very pointed insight as to why it was happening. Many were surprised that the not interested in seeing the movie score had reached 50% as this was the lowest score a Marvel film hard reached. When the number fell below 50%, it became a spiraling foregone fiasco as we begun to see a shift with the mouse house to stop the spiraling and conducting damage control.

Damage control became the thrust by steering positive interviews towards Brie Larson’s way with paid sycophants towing the mouse house line. The mouse house perhaps told her not to poison the well any further and cease the war with the ’40-year-old white dude’. In one online interview, Brie Larson doesn’t take responsibility or even apologize for her statement but seems to double down and avoid the question by stating that she doesn’t recall what she may or may not have said and instead states that she wants to “bring more chairs to the table”. Brie Larson was starting the cause the mouse house a lot of money before any money is to be made. Projected money to be made on the film started off at $168 million to $148 million to $100 million and the latest at $80 million. Soon, online media outlets began writing articles about the “trolls” attacking the film because a woman starring in it. The shill beasts were gathering their army around Brie Larson.

Online outlets like The Mary Sue, ComicBook.Com, Screen Rant wrote articles that contain content that wasn’t factual. Every last one of them stated that trolls had reviewed the film when in fact, nobody had reviewed the film as it wasn’t out yet. A point that many of the online bloggers made a point about but was ignored by the online media sources. What they did do was offer up their opinion as to why they weren’t going to go see this film. A completely different position. And the use of the words ‘troll’, ‘misogynist’ and ‘toxic masculinity’ has been tossed out there as adversarial bait as a dissuasive tool for people to discourage them from forming a negative opinion because this has become the machinery used by the so-called SJW’s. Attacking the fan base is a strategy now. Production houses, directors, and stars have started attacking the very fans that have spent their money on your properties and after they voiced their opinions as to why that property didn’t work and has fallen out of favor with them, you strike at the very heart of what has brought you acclaim. Do you begin to question the ethical approach of some of these media outlets as to if they are giving us honest journalism? Many of the articles seem like they are doing cut and paste as the same misinformation is being reported over and over again in verbatim in that the film had been reviewed when in fact it had not been. The views that people left were positive and negative but these publications took exception to the negative one and started to label the comments as trolls and misogynistic. So what do you call or refer to women who have negative opinions and comments about Brie Larson? Women too have voiced their objections with Brie Larson. We have come to a crossroad in our society where you can’t say anything bad or give criticism with anything anymore without getting a harsh rebut from the insane clown posses.

The 40-year-old white dude is tired and has had enough of being berated, derided and discounted to the point where it is becoming a thing in Hollywood where masculinity has become a four-letter word. On the CBS All-Access streaming service, Star Trek: Discovery is a haven for male bashing. The straight white male is an endangered species in that timeline. Male captains authority is countered by the female subordinates. In one episode, a white male flexes his authority and a few minutes later, he is killed after challenging the flying ability of his female colleague. A female general described men with “small tiny brains”. All of these incidents take place in this one episode. When Brie Larson made her statement, the backlash had just begun and men were not going to accept being punished just for being a man. We are not a monolithic one brain fits all acquisition. We are free thinkers. We are not anti-women.

When Wonder Woman came out, there was no opposition to this film from men. There was no anti-male rhetoric being said from its star, Gal Gadot or its director, Patty Jenkins. It was well received by both men and women. Alita: Battle Angel, another sci-fi picture, came out earlier this year with no hint of controversy until much later when one of the online media outlet, a purported SJW, started reporting negatively about the body of the robot, Alita, She laid the blame at the foot of men for sexualizing the fantasy of the ideal body. This was an example of unjustified blame that men have been put upon for merely existing. Alita is something and someone that Hollywood seek out character-wise, the strongly empowered woman troupe that’s been championed since the film, Norma Rae, first appeared some 39 years ago. We’ve been discussing women empowerment on all levels ranging from Hollywood to politics to other work areas and the men are silent and we forget that there are little boys who are being discarded in this process. Brie Larson’s current role of being an empowered female in this climate is no different except it seems as if reality versus fantasy has blended into a sense of invincibility as she speaks about having this new found power she’s never had before. I caution Ms. Larson to walk carefully as the power you may believe that you have is only equal to the power of what the people are willing to give you. It can disappear just as fast as you may think you perceived it.

Many in the online community feel as if Disney is having Brie Larson under damage control by having her conduct interviews with specific media outlets to put a spin on the new narrative they’ve created. When the not interested in watching this movie category vanished all of a sudden, the consensus was that Disney had gotten its hooks into Rotten Tomatoes. Why did Rotten Tomatoes do this? They put out a statement that the changes had been in effect for several months and under its current format, the numbers were confusing but the ‘interested in this film “ remained and was still active. You can’t just shut down one side and leave the favorable one still active. This was pure censorship through and through. We are in this dawn where any negative criticism is met with an opposing position. If you give a bad review on Yelp, you’re either sued or banished never to be heard from again. If you don’t believe and TV star’s alleged reporting of a hate crime, you’re a racist. If you oppose a big budget film starring a woman, you’re sexist and practice misogyny, even if you’re a woman. If Brie Larson wants to champion the cause of being an advocate for women of color, perhaps she should have let the role she is occupying go to a woman of color, after all, Maria Rambeau, a black woman, was the original Captain Marvel.

Disney has placed a lot of bank into Captain Marvel. But the truth is that the only thing people really want to see is the end credits where we can see any clues to Avengers Endgame. They could have saved them a lot of money by cutting out two hours and just show the last eight minutes of the credits. That is the only thing people are really interested in seeing, a hint to the conclusion to Avengers 4. I, along with a few other people, will probably see it and give it a review but I do so with protest.

Fountains of Wayne

YouTube’s Original Series Wayne and the making of an Anti-Hero

Cast

Series cast summary:

Mark McKenna … Wayne

Ciara Bravo … Del

Jamie Champagne … Brother Teddy

Jon Champagne … Brother Carl

James Earl … Officer Jay

Stephen Kearin … Sergeant Stephen Geller

Francesco Antonio … Reggie

Dean Winters … Daddy

Joshua J. Williams … Orlando

Mike O’Malley … Principal Cole

This is not your father’s Wayne’s World. In fact, it’s a whole new level on this particular Wayne. YouTube has boldly ventured into the arena of offering original content to its platform. I’ve watched two of their original series, Impulse, and Origins, and I thoroughly enjoyed Impulse while Origins started to lose me at the end mainly because of the Tom Felton character. This time, however, Wayne gave these eyes a chance to explore the foundation of a new character that’s brutal, in the literal sense, in its storytelling.

Mark McKenna, whom you may have seen in the 2016 film, Sing Street, plays the titular character Wayne, a teenager who is living by the margins of life. In the very first scene, you are not sure what is going on as you watch Wayne toss a rock through a window to a business. There are three guys standing outside the business when he does this. The owner comes out and Wayne promptly gets his ass kicked. Now you would think that this would be enough for anyone but for Wayne, he doubles down and picks up another rock and breaks another window. And so it begins and you take the bait.

You immediately start to like this kid without knowing a thing about him. Wayne, for the most part, is a quintessential loner and it seems like he wants it this way. He does have a friend but he appears to keep in close friendships a block away from him. He’s this new anti-hero. He fights the good fight for those who can’t. He takes on the bullies at his school like Clint Eastwood’s A Fist Full of Dollars. School is not his safe haven. He’s always at odds with the school principal, Mr. Cole, played very effective by Mike O’Malley from The Good Place and My Name is Earl fame. Principal Cole is a put upon soul trying to manage a school of students who just want to get through the day under the radar without being seen. Wayne represents that thorn in his big toe. He knows Wayne is not a bad kid but the trouble is like a magnet drawn to Wayne.

Enter Del, played with some gnashing teeth by Clare Bravo. You may have remembered her from the film Red Band Society with Octavia Spencer. Del has two older brothers who are dumb as cotton. The father, Daddy, is played by veteran actor, Dean Winter. He is quite good as the overbearing protective father that will go to any means necessary to keep his daughter out of the hands of Wayne. Wayne and Del’s coupling comes about in an unusual way and we learn much later in this ten-part series the motivation for Wayne to become involved with her.

Wayne lives with his father, a single dad. Dad, played by Ray McKinnon, is dying from cancer. Wayne is struggling with himself as he watches his father endure the pain from cancer because it is an expensive disease and there are pressures coming all around Wayne like a landlord wanting overdue rent monies. Dad has been living with cancer for a long time. He tries to extol some parting words to Wayne as he tells Wayne that he had this cherry vintage Pontiac Firebird Trans Am that he had restored and was to be pass on to Wayne but his wife, Wayne’s mother, took it when she left him for another man. This means nothing to Wayne as he’s concerned about his father. His father succumbs to the cancer battle and in a bizarre twist, Wayne set’s fire to the house with his father still inside.

In a series of twist, Del has joined Wayne on his motorcycle as he heads to Florida to claim the Trans Am. Let the road trip begin. Prior to leaving, Wayne gets into a fight with Del’s Daddy and her two older brothers. These fights aren’t pleasant and more street brawling. They are not, on the surface, choreographed ballet moves. Wayne bites off the nose of Daddy. Once Del leaves with Wayne, Daddy and the boys are in hot pursuit.

Daddy has also contacted the local law enforcement and asserted that Del was kidnapped by Wayne. Law enforcement is played by Stephen Kearin as Sergeant Geller and Officer Jay played by James Earl. These aren’t your typical cookie cutter cutout cops. Like Del’s Daddy, Sgt. Geller and Officer Jay decides to go after Wayne for allegedly kidnapping Del. Watching these two interacts with each other reminds you of a seasoned comedy duo with Sgt. Geller as the straight man and Officer Jay as the comic foil. This will not be your Hope and Crosby road show. Included in this road trip is Principal Cole and Orlando, Wayne’s only friend, played by Joshua J. Williams.

As the series unfolds, we get a backstory on Del’s mother. She is played surprisingly by Timeless’ Abigail Spencer. Del’s mom is a con artist and also might be a drug user. Her story is not really explored on the user side but more on the conning side. It’s not fully going into detail the mother’s cause of death only that she became ill and she wasn’t there anymore. If you are invested in this series, you would want to know what actually happens to her this late into the chapters. And too, you also had to wonder about if this backstory interrupts the pacing of the show like Stranger Things did with the backstory on the solo outing of Eleven?

As Wayne and Del get closer to Florida, they have their fair share to troubles and travails from having all of Del’s money stolen to trying to stay ahead of the law as their photos are displayed on the TV. They eventually make it to Florida and we finally get to witness Wayne’s not to motherly mother, Maureen, played by Micheala Watkins. Maureen is no June Cleaver by any stretch of credibility. She has long since abandon Wayne to his father and has never looked back. When she asks about Wayne’s father and he tells her that he’s dead, she doesn’t bother into wanting the details. And yet Wayne is trying to seek some sort of connection with his surviving parent. Del sees this and has total contempt for his mother as she tries to get Wayne to see that she isn’t the ideal mother or even to a lesser degree of a mother for him. Wayne is blinded by the euphoria of being around his mother and has ignored her flaws. He’s even lost interest in the very thing that’s brought him there, the Pontiac Trans Am, that’s being driven by his stepbrother.

Sgt. Geller and Officer Jay make it to Florida and there is a confrontation with the stepfather and Sgt. Geller. The stepfather wants to kick Sgt. Geller ass after Geller finds Wayne hanging in a garage and beaten up by the stepfather. We find that Geller has been arrested in a foreign land for several years and he’s sporting plenty of tattoos from his incarceration. While the stepfather may be known for being a street brawler, Geller’s ability to defend himself was a surprise reveal. Principal Cole and Orlando journey come with some revelations as well. This may have been a journey to retrieve Wayne but it becomes more of Principal Cole’s personal discovery about himself.

Wayne and Del have gotten a hold of the Trans Am. Del is driving while Wayne is unconscious. Out of nowhere, the car is T-boned and who should get out of the vehicle, Daddy and the boys. Del is knocked out and they carry her back to their truck. Wayne is left in the middle of the country road. What will happen next? Can we wait for Season 2?

Sex Education

- A Review of The Calculated Destruction of Male Masculinity

Bobbie L. Washington

Feb 2

Cast

Series cast summary:

Asa Butterfield … Otis Milburn

Gillian Anderson … Jean Milburn

Emma Mackey … Maeve Wiley

Alistair Petrie … Mr. Groff

Aimee Lou Wood … Aimee Gibbs

Ncuti Gatwa … Eric Effoing

Connor Swindells … Adam Groff

Netflix, that very popular streaming service with the clandestine rating numbers, has given us some film properties of late that have challenged to status quo that has upset the norm of how we view entertainment. Series like Stranger Things, Black Mirror, 13 Reasons Why and movies like Bird Box and the Oscar-nominated Roma has flipped the conventional habit of how we are doing business these days. We have come to view in one sitting, an entire series in a given period. Such a practice would never have been considered fifteen years ago but we will sit for hours to consume a show rather than just savor the moment. One such binge-watching series on Netflix is called Sex Education.

With such a provocative title, you’d think there would be lots of titillation going on in this eight-part series. You would be, however, mislead as you slowly invest hours into an odd pairing of characters, convoluted narratives and a plot to dissolve away any and all forms of masculinity in a covert fashion. So, let us begin.

Gillian Anderson portrays Dr. Jean Milburn, a psychologist who specializes in human sexuality. She is a divorced single mother to 16-year-old Otis Milburn played by Asa Butterfield. Dr. Milburn is also sexually promiscuous as she has several lovers come in and out of her bed in the first few minutes of the series. Otis is the unfortunate witness to all of this as on several occasions, the overnight guests mistook his room for the bathroom and they barge into his bedroom. As I watched this interaction between Otis and these strangers, I felt something missing but couldn’t quite put my finger on it as to what it was. Otis is also a virgin and that adds to the level of angst for the 16-year-old as his mother, the noted sex counselor, wants to know everything about her son’s issues as he goes through puberty.

Otis attends this odd nondescript high school in some European setting and he has a best friend, Eric, who happens to be gay, played by Ncuti Gatwa. I found this unusual not because of the gay/straight relationship but the fact that Otis didn’t have any other friends he associated with at the high school nor did Eric. In a normal setting, teens would be in groups and would have more than one friend that they would associate with. And given that Otis is straight and Eric is gay, I didn’t see any convincing commonality on the pairing.

Rounding off the cast is Emma Mackey who plays 17-year-old troubled student, Maeve Wiley. Connor Swindells plays Adam Groff, the headmasters troubled son. Alistar Petrie is the headmaster, Mr. Groff and Aimee Lee Woods plays Aimee Gibbs, Adam’s former girlfriend. Now keep in mind that Sex Education is supposed to be about the interactions and dynamics of16 and 17-year-old teens but the reality is that none of these “teens” looked like teens but instead looked all of the hard 20 something that they are. So that particular scenario was a couple of points removed from the suspension of being believable.

But what is the catalyst that gets Sex Education its start? Well, Adam is having sex with his girlfriend, Aimee but he is having a hard time coming. He even fakes an orgasm just to end the sex. Adam is frustrated, angry and is a bully. A typical trope we’ve seen a thousand times in teen movies. Because he can’t come, he targets Eric and takes his food and money. Adam later goes after Otis and winds up confronting Otis in a part of the school restroom that looks abandoned. Maeve uses it as her fortress of solitude in one of the empty stalls. She is there when Adam starts to discuss his problem with Otis. Otis starts to use some of his mother’s language and Adam thinks the advice is sound enough for him to accept. The only thing is that Adam takes the advice literally and he proceeds to get on a table in the cafeteria and tells his classmates his issue and proceeds to drop his pants to reveal his big dick, from his point, is the problem. That exposing himself in front of the student body gets him into trouble with the law and the school but his father smooths it over with the law and places Adam on some strict settings. This doesn’t make Adam any more pliable but more aggressive.

Maeve, on the other hand, sees this as an opportunity to make money. With many of the teens having sex problems, Otis can become their sex therapist. Otis eventually agrees to this but he must protest first for the sake of the story. Before I go on, let me just say that the title, Sex Education, is totally misleading. If you were to think that this is nothing more than teens talking about sex, just dismiss that notion. You are going to have to wait until episode three before any discussion of sex is initiated and even then, it’s clinical. In fact, most of the sex, nudity, and language is nothing shocking. It’s like all of the hype surrounding Fifty Shades of Grey. Once you saw it, it was totally boring.

Otis starts to develop feelings for Maeve as they start to work closer and closer. Maeve, on the other hand, has been having unprotected sex with the school jock. She gets pregnant and we go along with her through the abortion process. Oh, and Maeve has been living by herself in a trailer park for a while now as she has no parents to speak of. She does have a neer-do-well brother who comes back into the picture later on. The jock wants to get to know Maeve better and Otis ineptly tells him what Maeve likes and don’t like. He attempts to sabotage him but it backfires on Otis and Maeve winds up officially dating him instead of just being an occasional hookup.

Still, there was something about Sex Education that was throwing me off and then it finally hit me. There wasn’t any natural masculinity or any display of a normal Y chromosome. The men that slept with Otis’s mother didn’t display a Y chromosome. Every time you say one of her conquests, he was in her yellow bathrobe. Even one of them had an Oedipus complex. Otis doesn’t display a Y chromosome on several occasions. He never raises his voice in protest to the men who barge into his room thinking its the bathroom. He participates with Eric by dressing up in drag and going out for a movie event. He dances with Eric at a high school prom because they had a fight after Eric got beat up for dressing in drag. Eric’s father doesn’t display any Y chromosome as he lets his son put himself in harm’s way. Adam may have shown some Y chromosome but it is diminished when he has sex with Eric. Adam’s father also crushed Adam’s Y chromosome by being abusive. Keep in mind that I wasn’t looking for any high fuel testosterone from the likes of Dwayne “The Rock” Johnson and Jason Statham but the masculinity in this series was heavily muted. Even the jock in this series was living with two mothers and his masculinity was being crushed. It seems as if the topic of masculinity has become a bad thing these days and even displaying any is a bad thing and what better way to discourage it is to not show it. Unfortunately, this isn’t the real world and ignoring masculinity doesn’t mean you’re doing the world a service.

Now you would think that after a given period of time that the house of sex ed would implode and they would get caught but no. There is no hint of impending disaster form any authority figure or parental unit. There is one case of attempted blackmail but that had nothing to do with doling out sex advice and it was handled with efficiency. We do get signs of failure due solely on the failure of communication in the peer group and the misunderstanding that comes with immaturity. Ou will become frustrated at the ending as it begins to converge on too many alternate routes. It doesn’t end on a cliffhanger, it ends on a shelf with some aging cheese. In the end, you really don’t root for Otis because Otis still has issues, unresolved issues that he needs to figure out.