The Wandering Mind of a Rolling Stone

My first Halloween in grad school I walked into my office job wearing a Captain America costume. My boss wasn't familiar with who I was calling me "Flag Man" and "Mister A" before I finally sighed with defeat, took off the cowl, hung my head, and muttered "No, I'm Captain America." My favorite heroes are the idealists and they tend to stand for truth, justice, and the American Way. Steve Rogers literally wears a flag to let people know exactly who he is and what he stands for. These are all things worth fighting for and I would argue that they are all also currently under siege. Captain America has to exist beyond whoever is in office, beyond any army or agency. These things are run by people with agendas and agendas change quicker than the tides. The Winter Soldier sees what happens when Cap's ideals clash with agendas with far-reaching consequence. Tautly paced and tightly constructed, it's the first Marvel film that felt like it had...

I'm just going let you guys know straight up that the sophomoric effort behind the Asgardian Avenger, Thor: The Dark World is my least favorite MCU movie. By a country mile. It's pretty clear that Marvel Studios didn't quite know what do with Thor having already played out the fish-out-water card with the character's introduction to the MCU in 2011 and as supporting character the year before. With a character like Thor do you go dark fantasy? Embrace the more science fiction elements of the character? Do you go for the comedy again because the whole premise of Norse gods in SPAAAACE is fucking ridiculous [see: Ragnarok ]? Marvel actively took story pitches as they interviewed directors and actually hired future Wonder Woman director Patty Jenkins at Natalie Portman's urging initially only to let her go after not agreeing with her approach to the central narrative as a love story with Thor and Jane Foster as star-crossed lovers and Portman got understandably PISSED...

How does a guy like Tony Stark, who thinks he knows better than anyone else, who can explain the inexplicable, and to whom the potential for defeat isn't even a possibility confront the idea of aliens with destructive power dwarfing anything he could ever imagine and narrowly escaping his own untimely demise in the heat of battle? Not well. The big challenge for Iron Man 3 was narrowing the scope back down to individual characters after the superhero jam session that was the previous year's The Avengers . As it's the first solo superhero movie to gross over $1 billion at the box office, I would assume they succeeded but it's a movie that I feel like a lot of people forget exists which is kind of sad because I think it's leaps and bounds better than, say, Iron Man 2 or Thor . It just kind of completely whiffs on the third act after a spectacular opening and decent character study into Tony as he finds himself laid particularly low. When we first see Tony (not ...

I really have to credit Marvel Comics for educating me as a kid about intellectual property rights. Growing up, of course you just assumed that even though Marvel and DC were being published by different companies they could still interact (The publication of a Marvel vs. DC comic in the mid-90s only exacerbated this childhood misconception). And, hell, sometimes Marvel could throw down with the Street Fighter and MegaMan characters too, right? There were two Marvel vs. Capcom games going around at that point. As you get older, you find out legally why this doesn't really happen all that often if at all and you find out why the X-Men couldn't cross paths with Tobey Maguire's Spider-Man with the way Marvel had licensed out their properties to save themselves from bankruptcy for a pittance compared to what they're worth now. So you just kind of assumed that all these Marvel superheroes would never, ever cross paths in live action and would just have to be content with...

My first memories of Captain America didn't involve a comic book or a cartoon (Unlike a fair amount of Marvel characters in the 90s, Cap didn't get his own show). It wasn't that godawful straight to video flick that came out in 1990 (Though I totally saw that as a kid and thought it was the worst thing I had ever seen). It was the old Data East arcade game Captain America and the Avengers that saw the Star-Spangled Avenger lead the team to take on the Red Skull who was hiding out on the Moon for some reason. Waaaaay back then, I thought Iron Man was a robot, nobody really liked The Vision, and Hawkeye just looked lame. But Captain America? A guy that proudly wore the stars and stripes? Who didn't have to rely on lasers, armor, or trick arrows but rather a shield like a charging star defending truth, justice, and the American Way? He was the guy that stood out, that I wanted to use my handful of quarters playing as, if only for a few minutes ( Captain America and the Av...

In a team full of weird science, Thor was always a bit of the odd man out on the Avengers. Sure, the 2011 film that introduces the character tries to explain it off with the old Arthur C. Clarke axiom that science so advanced/different from our own would look like magic but there's straight up a chainmail wearing bearded man hitting frost giants in the face with a war hammer. Let's see your science explain that one. This was the movie that gave us Chris Hemsworth and Tom Hiddleston and they've both become household names ever since. Back in 2011, I was about to start up grad school and not the fresh-faced college from 2008 when the MCU first launched. I had enjoyed everything I had seen so far but still was wary especially as not-great X-Men movies were churning out at a regular pace in the interim. Seeing Thor was almost an obligation, I was truthfully more excited for the MCU's debut of Captain America a couple months later. I had read some Thor comics growing u...

A significant portion of my last semester in college was spent hanging out with German exchange students that had come all the way to Christopher Newport to study engineering; there were aerospace facilities within walking distance of my apartment. These guys had come all the way to my home state and I wanted to show them some of that Southern hospitality. That included BBQs, drinking contests, and, on one occasion, going to the movies. That movie was Iron Man 2 . The success of the first MCU movie literally caught everyone by surprise including the people that made it. A sequel was fast-tracked ahead of separate installments introducing Thor and Captain America with Jon Favreau jumping back in the director's seat and most of his cast (with the notable exception of Terrence Howard, replaced by Don Cheadle after a pay dispute) joining him. At the sequel's core are two characters haunted by the legacies of their departed fathers. Tony could never live up to his father's e...