Entertainment: CAPTAIN MARVEL and the pitfalls of Disney's political pandering

Last week we had the Oscars to cover, and that was pretty fun, but now what do we talk about?

How about women. It is after-all Women's History Month.

How about DISNEY, and their campaign for this weekend's March 8 release of CAPTAIN MARVEL, and the utter insufferably of that film's marketing?

Disney-owned Marvel Studios, who defecates about 2 or 3 films a year onto cinema screens worldwide with the most recent being this past summer's ANT-MAN & THE WASP (barely scraping $200 milion domestic) would like to have you believe that Captain Marvel is not only the first female character ever, but the only one. Ever. The only female super hero, the only woman, literally the only woman to ever live. This is helped by raging lunatic Brie Larson who plays the titular character and her incessant and ridiculous shrieking about how “important” her film is and how it is “the first of it's kind”, “not made for white males”, “her form of activism against males”, etc etc.

Let us jump in my time machine though, and look back at June 2017 with the release of WB's WONDER WOMAN starring Gal Gadot. Leading up to the film's release the WB/DC property was hemorrhaging on a fatal scale. Zack Snyder's bloated and dour BATMAN v SUPERMAN had just failed to cross $1 Billion dollars and sat with dismal reviews in March 2016 while filming was already underway for JUSTICE LEAGUE (another failure, but more on that later).

That summer, in 2016, cinema-goers got the chance to check out SUICIDE SQUAD which, while largely successful (nearly $750 million worldwide) and seen as a slight uptick from Batman/Superman was not the shot in the arm the “DC Extended Universe” needed. In comes Diana Prince, the Amazonian of Themyscira...Wonder Woman. Her film earns glowing reviews and was the tenth highest grossing film of 2017, making Gal Gadot a household name and bringing this icon of femininity, power, and justice from her comic book debut in the 1940's to her first full length film decades later.

WONDER WOMAN was a success because she broke the stigma of female-lead super hero films that came before like SUPERGIRL (1984), CATOWMAN (2004), and ELEKTRA (2005) and made people go “wow, a cape-flick with a chick? Not bad!”. Gal Gadot and the film studio didn't actively fight against men or “the patriarchy” and the film didn't have an embarrassing message about contemporary gender politics in it, it was just a fun origin story that happened to feature a female lead in a super hero context. SUPER HERO context. Not just “female lead” in general. So why in 2019 is the far left leaning and socially “woke” nu-age Hitler media empire Disney trying to hard to stir controversy around CAPTAIN MARVEL by making it some spectacle freak-show attraction?

“Come see Captain Marvel, the first ever movie to feature a woman! A SUPER hero woman no less!”

Disney fetishizes their minorities to latch onto current trends. This is a fact and not a simple observation. DC/Warner Brothers has made a point of their DC film universe (starting with 2013's Man of Steel) to give their female characters chances to shine...I mean, Wonder Woman got a solo film before Ben Affleck's Batman. And immediately after SUICIDE SQUAD, WB paid Australian bombshell Margot Robbie boatloads of cash to stay on as Harley Quinn who also has her own ensemble film coming out with four other female heroes. Cool. This is cool when you consider the “DC Film Universe” consists of six films over about 5-6 years.

This is, however, “not cool” when you look at Disney who has a catalogue of TWENTY FILMS since the year 2008 (more than a decade ago) and not once in that entire time bothered to give any of their exhaustive list of female characters a film...not even a founding member of the Avengers and once white-hot icon Scarlett Johanson's Black Widow character who first appeared in the THIRD installment of the Marvel Universe with IRON MAN 2 way back in 2010.

Yikes.

But, if I say CAPTAIN MARVEL looks like shit I'm a sexist. Everyone is a sexist for saying that according to all the Disney think pieces the Mouse Reich has been paying for and putting out on sites like HuffPost, Hollywood Reporter, Variety, etc. This is the same dangerous way of thinking that Sony Pictures handled 2016's maligned GHOSTBUSTERS Female reboot with which ultimately cost the film its life. I pray the same happens to Marvel.

Am I a sexist because I think this film looks like utter garbage? Yeah sure. In the same way that I have been labeled a racist for thinking Disney's BLACK PANTHER looked like and subsequently was utter garbage.

I'm a sexist and a racist because I like my characters and films to have context, heart, soul, something genuine. I've loved female heroes all my life and they occupy some- if not most- of my favorite films. Alice (Milla Jovovich) in the RESIDENT EVIL films, Ripley (Sigoruney Weaver) in the Alien franchise, Lisbeth Salander (Rooney Mara) in DRAGON TATTOO, Loraine (Charlize Theron) in ATOMIC BLONDE, Charlie's three angels (Liu, Diaz, Barrymore) in McG's hilariously cheesy CHARLIE'S ANGELS movies.

Hell, some of my favorite directors are women. Kathryn Bigelow who directed THE HURT LOCKER and POINT BREAK and Cathryn Hardwicke who directed TWILIGHT and LORDS OF DOGTOWN...I could keep going, really I could, but think of them and think of Captain Marvel...notice anything different? Like maybe the ones I mentioned arent sold by the film studio to be ogled like a zoo attraction to woo the masses of screaming radical feminists? Look at CAPTAIN MARVEL, look at Disney, and really think on that.