Gary's videos are usually entertaining, and the first 90 seconds of this video made me laugh. It is more entertaining than anything I've seen from Disney Marvel lately, which isn't saying much because Disney Marvel has systematically destroyed any feelings I had for the MCU.
Watch the first bit for a laugh. Watch the rest if you care about Thunderbolts*. I don't have any desire to see this movie, though I may watch it when it is free. on second thought, I won't watch it when it is free. Saving the world through the power of the Group Hug is only slightly less cringe than lesbian space witches.
Coincidentally, Marvel's been taxing the audience's mental health with most of the slop they put out since Endgame, which, unfortunately, you have to watch a lot of, to know what the hell's going on in Thunderbolts. A movie that only requires just a little bit of homework, and don't worry it's not much.
You just have to go back and watch 2018's The Wasp and Ant-Man, 2021's Black Widow, the full six episodes of the Falcon and the Winter Soldier, the full nine episodes of Hawkeye, and Captain African-American. Now you also have to watch the real Captain America trilogy, but I would suggest you do that, and just stop right there.
All of that "homework" is enough to keep me away. I have seen some of the list, but definitely not all of it. The first 90 seconds is comedy gold, the enter video is 19 minutes.
And since this movie sets up the next Avengers movie, I will likely pass on that. And since they have said, in so many words, that the upcoming Fantastic Four movie is going to be "Girl bosses team up to defeat that patriarchy," I will pass on that as well.
Marvel Studios is staring down yet another grim milestone. As Thunderbolts begins its theatrical run, domestic box office projections place the film’s opening weekend between $70 and $75 million. On paper, that might sound respectable—but in the context of Marvel’s recent track record, it paints a very different picture.
The Thunderbolts* movie has a "reported budget" of between $180 and $200 million. Since as far as I can tell it has NOT been the subject of numerous and lengthy reshoots, that may actually bear some congruence to reality. Add in another $100 or $125 million for marketing, and considering the fact that Disney will get roughly half of the box office receipts, this movie needs something like $600 to $700 million break even.
No. Movie theaters don't show movies for free. They get about half of the ticket price. Studios get a bit more than half in North America, and less than half in Europe and other places. Studios only collect about 25% of the box office from China.
The opening falls well below Captain America: Brave New World, which earned $100 million during its first domestic weekend. That film ultimately grossed just over $414 million worldwide. With a bloated budget and marketing costs factored in, it was widely deemed an abysmal financial loss for Disney.
Actually current projections indicate that the opening for Thunderbolts* is just slightly ahead of the 2021 release Eternals. That was a movie I couldn't watch for free. (It's available via my local library on DVD.)
This is sad because the movie reviews, from people that I actually trust, are all over the place. Some people hated it. Some enjoyed it. No one thinks it is great. But like so many people, I just don't care.
I have no faith in Disney, I haven't seen all of the Movies and Disney+ shows that lead into this, I have no desire to see all of them. I'm done with Disney Marvel. If it went away for 10 years, and came back with a crew COMPLETELY unrelated to the current set of hacks, AND I believed that they had figured out how to tell a compelling story, I would, maybe, give them a chance. The current people in charge of Disney Marvel are hacks, and activist hacks at that. "Don't give money to people who hate you," has been a long standing thing in my life.
In recent years, explosions have become a routine occurrence in Modern Multicultural Sweden. Hardly a day goes by without culture-enriching youths blowing up something or somebody. Hand grenades are particularly popular as a means of expressive social interaction.
The significance of the incident described in the following video report seems to be that explosive violence has escaped from the “sensitive zones” where gangs rule the streets and sharia law is enforced, and has moved into neighborhoods mostly inhabited by ethnic Swedes. Now Sven and Ingrid have no choice: they must experience cultural enrichment first-hand.
There is a video with subtitles detailing some of the recent insanity. A transcrip of the translation is also provided if you would rather read that.
00:13 Here in an idyllic row house area in Tumba, south of Stockholm,
00:18 some type of explosive device was thrown into the home of a 2-child family
00:22 where a mother and a child were severely wounded and were taken to a hospital.
00:25 We have met people here who live in the area where there is a prevailing depression today.
Read the whole thing. You won't see anything like this reported in the "Professional Media" in America, because of narratives.
The Netherlands have had assisted suicide longer than most countries, but I guess the Canadians are in a hurry to catch up.
Speaking of Canada, 7.3% of all people who died in Quebec died due to euthanasia.
Quebec has apparently "adopted the practice more enthusiastically than virtually any other human society."
And I'm sure that this has nothing whatsoever to do with the fact that treating sick people, and especially terminally ill people, is expensive. I mean, the government bureaucrats would never factor that into their calculations, would they?
“U.S. payroll growth totals 177,000 in April, defying expectations.” (Hat tip: Ace of Spades HQ.)
More proof that the Democrat Party is objectively pro-rape: ‘California Dems Vote To Keep Male Sex Offenders In Female Prisons.”
Some see influencers, I just see Italian bros from back in the day.
How does T. Rex leather compare to Corinthian leather? Short version, without Ricardo, its not as sexy.
Power Line: David Horowitz – Political war, Stephen Miller Scorches the Dems, and Who’s Unpopular?
Shark Tank: Gov. DeSantis Highlights Success Of Operation Tidal Wave
Louder With Crowder Here’s Why Canada’s Election Results Are A Golden Opportunity For Trump, America & Alberta, Vox Popoli, The Ports Shut Down, Postcards From Barsoom: Post-Mortem For The Canadian Election.
Nasdaq, S&P Winning Streak Extends to 8 Days
U.S. stocks rallied Thursday, with the Dow and S&P 500 posting their eighth straight session of gains after strong results from megacaps Microsoft and Meta
Lord Carney’s Realm: Canadians chose fear. Selfish boomers. Feds were fear mongers. A dance video.
Woke America: A new song from Neil Young. Picture of the year.
Stop trying to make Signalgate happen. Signalgate is not going to happen. But if we want to talk about security breaches, I’ve got an unsecured server in a certain traitor’s bathroom closet…
3. Ezra Levant interviews a lawyer who is a QC (Queen’s Council now King’s Council or kind of a certified high authority lawyer) on Alberta separation. However, as interesting as this is, anyone who still thinks we use stuff written down and passed by Parliament as the ...
‘RFK Jr. Claims Biden’s HHS ‘Became a Collaborator in Child Trafficking.’’ Not really a secret, the only thing is we do not know to what degree it was facilitated to get migrants up here, and to what degree it was done for far worse purposes
A fight escalated when one guy pulled a gun and opened fire. The other is a legal, concealed-carry license holder, and he returned fire.
Jackson, Michigan is about a 40 mile drive west of Ann Arbor, or about an 80 mile drive west of Detroit.
The guy who opened fire was hit twice, and he ran from the scene, but police located him and took him to a local hospital. The concealed carry license holder is cooperating with the investigation.
The investigation is still going on, but the police are treating this like self-defense, which is a human right.
What happens when you think you don't have anything to learn from the people who came before you? They were mostly white men, and today, they are old white men; they can't have anything to teach us, not even about the technology they helped create. Or so says the current generation of "artists" in Hollywood.
Except for the small fact that those old white men took modest budgets - by today's standards, even after you factor in inflation - and made classic movies. Why? They used special effects to enhance their story telling. They didn't throw away story telling in favor of nostalgia and gratuitous special effects. They didn't have the money for gratuitous special effects.
And shooting on film meant they had to create a plan and stick to it. Film was expensive, and getting more was frequently out of the question. The virtually unlimited recording afforded by digital hasn't made story telling better, it has made it - in the minds of the "artists" - think they don't need a plan. They can fix it later. But I think they are learning that the endless reshoots don't improve things really.
GUNSHIP is a darksynth band from England started by Dan Haigh and Alex Westaway. The group also includes Alex Gingell on drums.
While not being exactly the club music from my misspent youth, it does remind me of the glory days of old. (The tempo is a bit too slow for dance music.) And you can't have too much dance music in your life, or at least electronica.
As early as January 2021, the FBI was getting tips about a group of Discord users known as “764.” The group’s name turned out to be a reference to the ZIP code of Stephensville, Texas, home of Bradley Cadenhead. Then only 15 years old, Cadenhead had dropped out of school and holed up in his bedroom where he became the leader of perhaps the most monstrous online cult ever. Some accounts describe 764 as a spinoff of the CVLT, but these are ever-shifting online aggregations that are difficult to map. Cadenhead was arrested in August 2021 and in May 2023 was sentenced to 80 years in prison. However, the 764 cult continues to make headlines
This also reinforces my conviction that society is breaking down. This incident didn't take place is a large city. Stephensville, Texas is about a 70 mile drive southwest of Fort Worth.
Click thru for more details, other incidents, and links to info.
What happens when the company that made the car goes out of business? Spare parts are one thing, but where do you go for spare code? Fisker Ocean owners are guinea pigs for this automotive frontier right now.
It’s hard to convey the scale of the comedy in this article, which received a lot of attention. Brooks lifts the opening from Genesis (“In the beginning there was agony”) and the ending from the Communist Manifesto (see below). In between lay a call for “mass civic uprising” which spends much of its time trying to figure out where to find the “civic” part, after drafting corporate lawyers, university administrators, “corporate executives,” reporters, and — what other kinds of people live in America? It’s either the funniest revolutionary manifesto ever, or the most touching.
It is so funny (in a pathetic way) FINALLY seeing the liberals I know waking up to the fact that federal agents abuse regular people.
Sure, it took attempting to deport illegals to get them to actually notice for the first time ever, but right now I'm seeing them doing this big histrionic freak out, all OMG federal agents came into people's homes and were rude and mean and wrecked stuff and took property even though those people were citizens and hadn't done anything wrong!
Have you ever noticed how election results are regularly broken down geographically, as well by the demographic categories of age, sex, and – depending on the country – race, yet we almost never see the results separated into taxpayer vs taxeater status?
Dear Nashvillians, I believe you may need to buy a lot of Vaseline for the upcoming assessment festivities. Then again, I do call Nashville San Francisco by the Cumberland because it keeps proving me right.
Remember the fuss about the alleged Venezuelan gang members that were deported over Judge Boasberg's objections? Did you know the Court overturned his injunction April 7th?
Carbon sequestration is potentially a $250 billion market - says the article - but what do you do when the forest you are paying for you carbon credits... Burns down?
The backstory: The Lakeland Police Department says the shooting happened at Cali Rose 15 Kitchen off Ariana St. just after 9:30 p.m. Thursday.
According to investigators, Jesse Banks, 28, and Nicholas Lue, 26, instigated the argument with a 24-year-old man just outside the front entrance to the restaurant.
They punched the 24-year-old in the head, and when another person exited the restaurant, one of them drew a weapon and pointed it at the 4th guy.
That's when LPD says the 24-year-old also pulled out a gun and fired several shots, hitting Banks and Lue.
Banks died at a local hospital while Lue is expected to recover.
Lakeland, Florida is roughly halfway between Orlando and Tampa.
While the investigation is far from complete, the police are calling it self-defense, which is respected in Florida.
I'm not a fan of Apple and their walled garden. They have some decent tech, which is too expensive, and they have some questionable software, but they have a few awful business practices. They got pulled up short on some of those business practices on Wednesday, April 30th.
Apple's anticompetitive behavior included (mostly) their 30% tax on every transaction carried out through any app on the phone. Epic Games (the folks behind Fortnite) defied them and were banned, they took Apple to court. Epic even redid the old Apple 1984 commercial. (For those of you too young to remember the 1984 Apple v IBM commercial, it is linked at the bottom.)
And yes, this is mostly Schadenfreude.
"You Either Die A Hero, Or You Live Long Enough To See Yourself Become The Villain." Apple went from the plucky underdog in 1984 to the villain in 2020.
Yesterday the judge in the case - which was supposed to have been decided in 2021 - told Apple to stop screwing around, and referred them on a Contempt of Court Charge to the DOJ.
Judge Yvonne Gonzalez Rogers is pissed off at Apple. Really, really pissed off.
In Rogers’ newly released 80-page decision, she took Apple and its executives to task for defying the court’s orders in its original case with Fortnite maker Epic Games. Though Apple largely won that round, as it was determined the tech giant was not a monopolist, the court decided that Apple was behaving in an anticompetitive fashion in one specific area: by not allowing app developers to offer their customers other ways to pay outside of Apple’s own payment platform.
I. OVERVIEW
For the reasons set forth herein, the Court FINDS Apple in willful violation of this Court’s 2021 Injunction which issued to restrain and prohibit Apple’s anticompetitive conduct and anticompetitive pricing. Apple’s continued attempts to interfere with competition will not be tolerated.
Or at least the collapse of any respect they once had. American Thinker brings us Judge Not
As the prior outrageous injunctions by a number of (judge-shopped) District Courts make their way up the judicial ladder, even more of them were issued this week. I think everything the President has done is the object of at least one District Court injunction. In the meantime, corruption of the judiciary has become so overt that two judges were placed under arrest this week.
Some of the more egregious issues are mentioned. And then there's this.
Two judges were arrested this week, and media reports largely downplayed the extent of their crimes. One, Juan Cano in New Mexico, was arrested for harboring a Tren de Aragua member in his home and obstructing justice by destroying evidence against the alien.
Destroying evidence of a federal crime, federal GUN crime, would seem to be beyond the pale. But liberals, including judges, are no longer interested in the rule of law. They really haven't been in a very long time.
When ICE arrested several of them, Cano resigned his position, and last week his wife and he were arrested for harboring those gang bangers. AT contributor Clarice Feldman provides additional information the lamestream media is largely avoiding about the probable cause for that arrest:
That probable cause was providing guns to prohibited persons. That's right, giving guns to gang members.
During his FBI interview, former judge Cano — after being Mirandized — straight-up confessed that he’d found Ortega’s missing cellphone, smashed it with a hammer, and threw it in a city dumpster. Cano explained he did it because he knew it had pictures and videos of Ortega with guns — which were direct evidence of federal gun crimes and gang activity. [Ref. the article linked at the top]
The post at Stately McDaniel Manor has a great number of links to other bits on this general topic. Click thru.
I have always liked Mike Rowe since I first saw his show Dirty Jobs way back when. I don't remember when it started exactly, but I have liked his podcast as well.
He has a new "show" that is going to be on YouTube, and probably other places as well, called People You Should Know. I will let the people involved explain it.
According to the Durham Police Department, officers responded on Jan. 8 at around 1:30 a.m. to a report of a gunshot wound at a home on Lions Court near the intersection of Sundial Circle. They found 50-year-old Judah Taylor, who had been shot. He was pronounced dead at the scene.
This length of time seems to be on par with other incidents ruled self-defense in North Carolina, even if it seems long to me.
Police said the case was reviewed by the Durham County District Attorney and determined to be self-defense.
Somehow I missed this incident when it originally took place.
The White House Correspondents Association has been forced to address the coverage they gave the Biden Administration and Joe Biden's declining mental health. They still won't admit the truth.
Axios’ Alex Thompson was perhaps the only person to tell a bit of the truth.
“we bear some responsibility”
They still don't get it.
It would be gross negligence to call this disingenuous. It’s complete bullsh*t. They didn’t miss it. They participated in the coverup. For anyone to swallow their assertions now one would have to engage in what’s needed for movies and TV shows. It’s called willing suspension of disbelief. The term was originated by Samuel Taylor Coleridge
The definition is available if you click thru, but there are still some important things left unexamined.
This isn’t a small thing. It is not a small scandal. It is one of the biggest stories in the last several decades. America was being controlled by some unelected person or cabal and the media is still not asking the right questions nor digging.
A review of Thunderbolts* by Alan Ng from Film Threat.
The first problem is apparently the cast of thousands, mostly consisting of people I don't know or care about when I do know.
Hopefully, you’ve been watching every Disney+ Marvel series because you know that Valentina Allegra de Fontaine (Julia Louis-Dreyfus) has been authorizing covert operations around the world using B-Level superheroes as her pawns. These heroes include Alternate Captain America, John Walker (Wyatt Russell), Ghost (Hannah John-Kamen) from Ant-Man and the Wasp, and Taskmaster (Olga Kurylenko) from Black Widow. Of course, we also have Black Widow’s sister, Yelena (Florence Pugh), and father, Alexei, also known as Red Guardian (David Harbour), in the mix.
And here is the reason I won't be seeing the movie.
Here’s the problem with Thunderbolts*. It’s supposed to be a superhero film, but it’s not. It’s part sit-com. Every line of the film comprises humorous one-liner dialogue and jokey lines. Red Ghost is probably the only person who should be a joke, but we have a team of characters who don’t like one another and can only express their displeasure through joking around and bustin’ balls. Unless there’s some exposition that needs to be dropped, it’s one mildly humorous line after the other. If the characters on screen refuse to take the situation seriously, then why should we?
The current set of writers and producers for Marvel can't seem to take the franchise seriously. Go back and watch the first Tobey Maguire/Sam Raimi Spider-Man from 2002, the movie that basically kicked off the era of superhero films that actually made money. That movie from 2002 took itself seriously. The sequel to that movie also took itself seriously. Were there jokes? Of course. But it wasn't one joke after another. The current set of superhero movies don't take themselves seriously, and don't make money.
In the end, Alan Ng gave this movie a score of 3 out of 10.
From Alan Ng's description in the article, and what he and Chris Gore say in the video, they are apparently trying to reproduce Guardians of the Galaxy, or The Avengers, or The Suicide Squad, or something similar, and they have failed.
I am also tired of both the current set of superhero movies coming out of Hollywood - I wonder what lectures about politics are included in this one - and I am really tired of ensemble movies. They work best when they include characters I care about, but Ghost, and Taskmaster, and Alternate Captain America don't fit that bill, and while Florence Pugh and David Harbour are good actors, I just don't care about the characters they are playing.
Not only will I not pay to see this, I will probably not watch it when it is on streaming, unless friends insist. (And yes, I do see movies - rarely - in a theater; a national chain that is near me shows matinees for less than 7 bucks, and even cheaper on Tuesday.)
I trust Alan Ng and Chris Gore. They say when movies are bad, and when they are good. I agree more with Alan than Chris, but then Chris admits that he likes odd-ball, independent films. Me, not so much.
And since I don't have the patience to go through a whole bunch of reviews, I just rely on Disparu to do that. He finds comedy in the movie reviews. Here is his meta review of reviews. Thunderbolts Critic Reviews Gave Me DEPRESSION. It is 23 minutes, but is likely more entertaining than the 27 minute therapy session, which is actually in the movie.
