On this week’s episode, the Substandard takes on Logan and the X-Men series. What does Sonny really think about parents who take their kids to R-rated movies? Plus JVL has a special surprise in store for Vic! All on this week’s Substandard!
This podcast can be downloaded here. Subscribe to the SUBSTANDARD on iTunes or on Google Play.
Endnotes and digressions
* We opened the show talking about how Harriet Tubman might be the original American badass. If she had been a professional wrestler, I like to think her entrance would have been something
like the Undertaker’s during his biker gimmick.
* Also, we all agreed that there needs to be a Harriet Tubman movie which re-imagines her as an X-Men-style mutant superhero. After much discussion, we agreed that she should probably have Kitty Pryde’s power set. But listener Jason O’Connell writes in with a different idea:
I love it. Someone should get Max Landis on the phone.
* I’d never heard of the Mary MacLeod Bethune statue that Victorino likes so much.
Here’s what it looks like.
* On the subject of Logan, Vulture has a nifty
history of the Mark Millar book Old Man Logan, which created the foundation for the movie. I highly recommend both it and the original.
* My other comic book recommendation is
House of M, which is probably the last truly great comic book event series. It’s awesome.
* Sonny has an interesting piece about the “dystopian” world of Logan over at the Washington Post.
It’s must reading. Ditto his notes on
X-Men and the mutant menace over at the Free Beacon.
* On the subject of Logan, as I said during the show, I liked it a bunch. One of the few things I didn’t love was how under-written the Reavers were. And how actor Boyd Holbrook was doing a low-rent Val Kilmer impersonation in his role as the head Reaver. Every time he was onscreen I couldn’t stop thinking about how much better the movie would have been with the actual Val Kilmer in the part.
* By the by, Logan director James Mangold has had a sneaky-good career, hasn’t he? The excellent 3:10 to Yuma. The criminally underrated Knight and Day. Walk the Line, The Wolverine, and now Logan. That’s a pretty solid body of work.
I’m mean, he’s no Scorsese, but …
* One thing we didn’t get to discuss on the show is the fact that the X-Men have proved to be the most durable Marvel film franchise. Why is that? Is it the broad cast of characters? The way the X-Men lend themselves to topicality? The richness of the source material? Or maybe that the X-Men movies really haven’t been hamstrung by very many continuity claims. They just tell stories, rebooting and ignoring earlier works as needed? I’d be interested to hear your thoughts.
* On the subject of Strong Female Leads, I started listing them on the show, but to underline my point, here’s the list I was able to come up with in 30 seconds off the top of my head:
Kill Bill, Hunger Games, Terminator 2, Crouching Tiger Hidden Dragon, La Femme Nikita, The Fifth Element, The Long Kiss Goodnight, Tomb Raider, Mad Max: Fury Road, Haywire, The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo, Miss Congeniality, The Heat, Resident Evils, Underworlds, GI Jane, Charlie’s Angels, Prometheus, Buffy the Vampire Slayer, Hannah, Lucy, Ghost in the Shell…
As you can see, the pushing of Strong Female Leads is a solution in search of a problem.
* And as always, you can download the episode here and subscribe to the Substandard on iTunes or on Google Play.
We’re closing in on a hundred five-star ratings. The person to give us our hundredth five-star review gets his or her very own Beauty and the Beast coloring book. Laminated.
–JVL
