Deadpool & Wolverine (2024)

I just do not get the Marvel Universe, and in my defense, there is a lot of material there to keep up with. The sheer volume of spin off TV shows that are required watching or you just cannot keep up with what is going on and it jsut gets even more confusing. Deadpool is the exception to the rule though. Hw seemed like the anti-superhero, the one who could poke fun at himself. Now, 8 years on from his first appearance, Ryan Reynolds’ sweary superhero has evolved from plucky insurgent to the cornerstone of a potential Marvel revival, which I hear is much needed. So when he refers to himself as ‘Marvel Jesus’ in this splashy, extremely violent, timeline-traversing quest to protect his friends and beloved ex (Morena Baccarin, barely in it) from erasure, he’s not kidding. Deadpool Wolverine is a franchise resurrection dressed as an odd-couple bromance, with a new version of Hugh Jackman’s grizzled Wolverine along for the ride. And it’s altogether too much heavy lifting for a character who lives to snark from the sidelines to be for naught. This was strangely entertaining, despite it's over the top gore, but it puts me no closer to understand ing where Marvel is headed.

When The Clock Broke by John Gantz

This is the long story of how we in the United States got to where we are today, which is a country where the Republican presidential candidate in 2024 was an avowed white supremacist fascist who advocated the violent overthrow of the government if he couldn't win legitimately and the race was literally too closed to call. That does not, however, capture what the book is about--it is largely a political recapitulation of 1992 in the U.S. The author's angle is that the populist resentments of today’s MAGA America were present in that late-recessionary year, in which the country, having emerged triumphant in the Cold War, turned in on itself. It is an interesting proposition to contemplate--and for me, it was a lot interesting to read in such detail. I was, after all, alive and well during this period, and (apparently inappropriately relieved) to have a third candidate break the stranglehold that Reagan had on beefing up the wealthy and gutting the middle class. He places the origins of the current distemper earlier than most others do--although some trace them all the way to Andrew Jackson in 1828, or at least to the Civil War. Some people never got over having a caste system whereby as a white person, no matter how poor and uneducated, you are not at the absolute bottom of the ladder. The Ross Perot phenomenon of 1992 and the related crack-up of the Reagan Republican Party under George H.W. Bush is a major flag for Ganz’s argument, and he mines the period for other useful omens--Pat Buchanan, Rush Limbaugh, and Howard Stern, to name a few.

Daughters (2024)

I wondered where the idea for this documentary came from, and I read that review that explained it. In 2013, Angela Patton gave a TED Talk that got lot of mileage. She spoke about a program she created in Richmond, Virginia, to bring girls and their incarcerated fathers together in an environment that would make the fathers and daughters feel cherished and connected. These “Daddy Daughter Dances” have been so impactful the program has expanded to other prisons. This movie is co-directed by her and is a documentary about the first of these dances in a Washington D.C. prison. To qualify for the program, the fathers have to complete a 10-week program to strengthen their fathering skills, which means sharing some painful experiences, regrets, and fears. One man says it is the first time he has ever been in an environment where men talk about feelings. As the title indicates, Patton and co-director Natalie Rae make the girls the center of the story, with four as the focus. They all miss their fathers to varying degrees, and while the reasons they are in prison are never discussed, but the daughters are aware of the time they have left and the things that they are missing because of it. There are dozens of carefully observed and touching moments in “Daughters,” which won both the Documentary Audience Award and the Festival Favorite Award at Sundance. Watching the fathers change out of their orange prison uniforms into jackets and ties is extremely powerful. And then it becomes even more meaningful as we see some of the fathers teaching others how to tie a tie, a skill we associate with tended bonding moments between father and son, then with occasions like graduation, dates, and interviews for office jobs that these men never had. It is a movie well worth watching.