This week stayed on the light and fluffy side, which is good, and leaned into the primary conceit of the series, which is better. Up to now, this season hasn’t done much with increasing Our Vending Hero’s transformations, just rehashing things he’s used before, but he takes some time to think about the concept of a vending machine and how he’s already stretched it, and then exploits it.

I’d be happy if he never used the diet-coke-and-mentos “explosives” ever again, and if his telekinesis wasn’t a whatever-the-episode-needs power (seriously, when did he learn to make balloon animals?). Creating an endless supply of pachinko balls is new, and soaking them in lube and launching them in two-liter coke bottles is pushing the boundaries of “vending”. I thought he could vanish generated “trash” at will, though, so I don’t know why he used his car-wash sprayer to get rid of the slippery balls.

The other thing they did was actually create a tiny bit of backstory for one of the supporting characters, deciding that the mage in the Fools party was half-vampire. No idea if they’ll do anything with it, but it stuck out.

Verdict: I hope these last two weeks represent the overall direction of the show, and it’s not going to veer back into high-stakes world-saving again.

Zombies vs Aliens

New Zombieland Saga movie trailer.

‘Hot’ take

I have yet to see a picture of Sydney Sweeney in which she appears to be more than a mildly-pretty young gal with a decent body; I’ve had better-looking women bag my groceries. But I’m not dunking on her for that; I’ve spent enough time with professional models to know that what I’m seeing is severely edited, and that the blank stares and lifeless poses are what the client wants (I swear to this day that Playboy must have used an electric cattle prod on Julia Schultz to eliminate her sweet personality and glorious smile in her centerfold shoot).

Anyway, to Our Clueless Leftie Friends: if you’re gonna smear Miss Sweeney as a Nazi, you really shouldn’t be surprised when a million men show up begging to annex her Sudetenland. I’d tell you to pick your battles more wisely, but I like seeing you lose.

Where did they go wrong?

IMHO, it wasn’t the woke bullshit that killed the Marvel Cinematic Universe; it was already dead to me by that point. The first Marvel movie I walked away in the middle of was Age Of Ultron. I couldn’t even tell you precisely where I gave up; it didn’t interest me enough to watch it in a theater, and when I rented it for streaming, I just stopped watching at some point. Iron Man 3 and The Dark World were okay, The Winter Soldier was decent, and Guardians Of The Galaxy was a blast, but Ultron just felt tedious, and I had to fast-forward a lot to make it through the wretched Civil War.

Rewatching the older movies recently reconfirmed the real fatal flaw: mandatory crossovers, the same thing that drove me away from their comics many years before. When a linear story gets spread across multiple franchises to force fans of one character to follow every other, they’re exploiting customer goodwill to make a buck, and deliberately making their product worse.

Ant Man and Doctor Strange succeeded by being standalone movies with brief cameos that placed them in the same world. Shang-Chi, while quite flawed by “the concerns of ‘modern audiences’”, was still fun, and even managed to make Awkwafina engaging. The rest? Just not worth my time.

Along this line, it’s relevant to note that one of the primary callouts in The Critical Drinker’s positive review of Fantastic Four is:

“For once, I didn’t have a laundry list of movies and TV shows I needed to catch up on just to understand what the fuck was even happening here.”

(Deadpool & Wolverine only worked because the baggage for both characters was outside the MCU, and they took plenty of shots at the cruft that’s built up over the years; a future project that’s fully incorporated is unlikely to recapture the magic)

Loosely related…

Star Trek: Strange New Worlds season 3 came out recently, and I was so excited that it took me a week to remember it existed. The first episode resolved last season’s cliffhanger ending in an only moderately-contrived way, but it worked well enough. Characters got to do character stuff, and Young Scotty being shaped by his mentor was actually fun to watch.

The second episode immediately dove into Spock’s love life, though, and I stopped watching. I might grind it out, or I might skip ahead.

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