Mighty Marvel Monday: New Year, New Stuff

Happy New Year!

marvelnewyear

And welcome back to another Mighty Marvel Monday, the weekly Marvel news column predicated on the belief that in an age of information overload, it’s easy to miss what’s actually going on. Who has time to actually read all of the dozens of links posted each day? And more importantly, why should you bother when I’m going to do it for you?

So, let’s start the new year off right by sorting through the complicated issue of the upcoming Doctor Strange movie. With the New Year has brought a new marketing push and it’s clear that Marvel is trying so, so hard to make this movie appealing to non-traditional comic book movie fans, and I’m am beginning to embody Regina George every time they announce something that could have been cool.

Stop trying to make Doctor Strange happen, Marvel.
Stop trying to make Doctor Strange happen, Marvel.

See, with Mads Mikkelson confirmed as the main villain, Chiwetel Ejiofor as Baron Mordo, and late additions like Rachel McAdams, the cast is possibly the most impressive (or at least critically acclaimed) cast assembled in a Marvel venture to date. And as part of the big Doctor Strange marketing push, Marvel is trying to show how progressive the casting of Tilda Swinton is as The Ancient One in terms of The Ancient One’s gender–which is not simply female as had been assumed, and puts a twist on whether the character is genderswapped or genderbent.

Feige is quoted as saying:

“Look, she’s a chameleon in everything she does […] She has this amazing [ability to] harness of this androgynous sense. So, we use the term ‘her’ and ‘she’ in the film but, other than that, it’s very androgynous. Because it doesn’t matter.”

Swinton herself, when asked whether The Ancient One is a man or a woman, responded: “I wouldn’t know how to answer that one. I think it’s all in the eye of the beholder.” This is something that I very much wish I could support, because as Swinton is incredibly important to me, personally, in terms of how I understand my own gender, especially in terms of what it means to be non-binary or agender.

Except the whitewashing issue won’t go away no matter how androgynous and beyond gender Tilda Swinton is (as was recently reiterated on this Harpy column on HitFix). Marvel could make The Ancient One a non-binary or agender character, and it could be amazingly progressive about it (unlike Benedict Cumberbatch’s androgynous disaster in the Zoolander sequel), and the character would still be whitewashed.

Moving on from movies I wish I could like to movies I wish I didn’t like, there’s a new very VERY NSFW Deadpool trailer.

Deadpool remains one of the heroes I’m pretty meh about due to his popularity amongst the bro set, but the marketing is tonally on point down to the fourth wall breaking. Dammit.

There is conspicuously no new Civil War stuff out, so now to switch gears from the big screen to the small screen.

The end of December also gifted us with a bunch of new Daredevil information. Entertainment Weekly also had the first photos from season two of Daredevil, including Jon Bernthal’s Punisher, and Elodie Yung’s Elektra, last glimpsed in the final 30 seconds of this trailer released at NYCC in October.

As for the season itself, it seems to be posed to dig deeper into Matt’s morality (and by extension, Marvel’s morality) with the Punisher as the “big bad,” but it also appears as though with Claire, played by the ever lovely Rosario Dawson, now on Luke Cage, Matt will be facing a romantic dilemma, or at least be between a rock and a hard place, in regards to Karen Page and Elektra. According to showrunner Doug Petrie,

“Matt’s a deeply moral complicated guy and she’s just the best bad girlfriend you can possibly have. […] She does everything wrong and attractive, she’s his id, the wild side. Matt is always taming his wild side. Elektra just lets it out. He’s both repulsed and deeply drawn to that.”

May can’t get here soon enough, in my opinion. But while we’re waiting for Daredevil, it’s time to get excited about Luke Cage, which is filming right now.

The L.A. Times has an interview with Mike Colter, who is not merely just as swoon-inducing as himself as his character, but intelligent and articulate, as you can see for yourself in this excerpt:

In the comic books, your character was wrongfully imprisoned and wrongfully convicted. Is “Luke Cage” going to address things that are going on right here, right now like Black Lives Matter?

I’m very aware of the current environment that we’re in, especially in America, what’s going on with the police and what’s going on with these incidents. I’m acutely aware of it. This is not necessarily the platform to hit it head on. That being said, I really feel like Luke Cage is a timely hero right now. I feel like what we’re doing subtly — with the storytelling and how he is as a character — that’s going to be different than what you saw in “Jessica.”

I don’t think you can effectively do anything to resolve all of the issues that we have as a society, but we can inspire people to look at themselves and to think about their actions. We have a long path, and we try to tell a long story with Luke Cage. The things that he’s going through will ring true for a lot of people in law enforcement and for those who are not in law enforcement. And people who are on the street will also relate to this character.

But it takes more time, and it takes more than just a couple episodes to go, “Hey, this is right, this is wrong.” Because it’s never really black or white. It’s always a gray area, and so I think Luke Cage, the character himself, lives in a gray area. There are always a lot of things where people see a person and they think they know a person based off of their visuals. That’s something that, society, we have to get away from. I’m guilty of it, everyone’s guilty of it.

We start with stereotypes — we start to judge people based off of their appearance — and those things we think may or may not be true. In exploring this character, we’re going to get a chance to see something that’s very unique in the sense that everyone goes through this. How you look is going to tell people who you are, but it may not be true, but you have to live with that and you have to then try to figure out a way to go on with your life.

It’s also about redemption. He’s a renaissance man, he’s trying to better himself and there’s something to be said about someone who’s always trying to make themselves better, trying to change. That’s what life is about, to me, anyway. That’s what life seems to be about for Luke Cage. If you’re going to start in one place in life, you should end somewhere else. Life is about development and change and we should never be the same all the way throughout, or what’s the point in living? We should be trying to find some way to explore new things and learn every day. Even if we make mistakes, learn from mistakes and move forward, but it should never be about static. One position, we know everything, we’re never going to change. That’s just boring.

Hear hear.  Having this series debut the same month as Doctor Strange is definitely going to be interesting for Marvel.

ICYMI

Agent Carter premieres January 19th, which is just over two weeks away, and there is a trailer on the Agent Carter twitter.

There is also a new sneak peek, with actual footage!

And although I was inconsolably sad to hear that Lyndsy Fonseca was only going to be in one episode (despite a premise that lended itself to Peggy being Angie’s supportive girlfriend while she pursued her acting dreams in Hollywood), it does my Cartinelli shipper heart good to know she’s part of an elaborate dream sequence. Oh yes. 

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Kate Tanski

Kate Tanski

Recovering academic. Fangirl. Geek knitter.

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