I'm not sure my French is good enough to understand the full subtleties of Libé's review of the Michael Jackson biopic

Also an utterly bizarre take on the founding of Israel which he seems to believe the Attlee government was a prime mover in???

Of the nearly infinite stream of legitimate critiques of the Starmer government, “not nostalgic enough about Labour and the old working class” manages to be a rare *miss*

Among other things, I enjoy the closing rant about how Labour today doesn’t care about the working class voters they did in the 1940s, a thing you can certainly believe if you have never heard or read literally anything about them

Derived I will say from the work of Hagith Sivan and more recently Adrastos Omissi!

But because there isn’t a civil war and both sides have an interest in pretending there’s no conflict at the time and never was one afterwards, and especially because Theo ultimately takes over the whole thing and leaves his kids in power, everything gets hushed up and we get the official story

Anyway my own theory of this (with a few but a minority of scholars) is that Theo wins a skirmish, seizes the moment to have his army acclaim him as emperor in the absence of an eastern ruler, and then dares Gratian to do anything about it, and Gratian fumes and sulks for a year before saying “FINE”

Later Gratian *does* acknowledge him. But it still appears very frosty, and with little cooperation.

And Theodosius’ own propaganda will claim that Gratian made him emperor but also weirdly downplays his role at the same time? It feels forced IMO

There are no contemporary records to fill in the blanks. But we do have sources from Gratian’s court the next year in 379 and they *completely* ignore the existence of Theodosius. No mention. Probably no coins. Silence, even in all the venues that normally acknowledge co-emperors

The story in our sources is:

August 378; Valens killed by Goths

Late 378: Theodosius, a completely undistinguished and only recently rehabilitated general of probably modest rank, is active near the front & wins a minor victory

January 379: Gratian makes Theodosius co-emperor

This is… weird

I think it’s plausible that Theodosius I usurped the throne illegally without Gratian’s consent and successfully covered it up for ~1700 years

Doc Strange 2 has the admittedly extremely comic book thing where you sort of have to see Wanda Vision to get it but it also feels hard to reconcile with Wanda Vision’s conclusion?

Profound political debate

Remember how in FWS, people keep accusing each other of being ‘supremacists’ except with no attached ideological marker so it is unclear who exactly anyone believes is supreme

This is pretty much my view too

I think “well it’s just a comedy” could be fine but the movie itself tries to have it both ways: it wants to seem like it’s saying something about grieving and even at one stage about imperialism (??) but is also too petrified of sincerity to ever land any of its beats

It is undone within the film itself! It isn’t a theme, it’s a line they pay lip service to while nobody in the film actually cares about the people right down to Thor not giving a single fuck about his friends all being murdered early on and then everyone jokes about it!

The best thing I can say about it is that there was 3 hours less of it than Falcon and Winter Soldier

Does Thor 4 land the emotional beat of Jane’s death? It does not, at all

OTOH does it immediately have characters start mocking and deriding and cracking jokes at the idea of characters - or an entire world! - dying? No, therefore it’s better than 3

Thor 3 represents the absolute pinnacle of the MCU’s *terror* of sincerity, the deep set gnawing fear that someone somewhere might have an authentic reaction to or care about anyone or anything

2 is a worse movie than 3 but a better Thor movie

Thor > > > Thor 4 > Thor 3 > Thor 2

(This is not an invitation for people to begin discussing their own view of these movies right here, which they seemingly need little incentive to do)

This actually gets at another thing that I think is kind of interesting and telling: there’s basically no fan consensus on a whole swathe of those movies incl. Wakanda Forever, GOTG3, Love and Thunder, Doc Strange 2? Agreement they are worse than earlier ones but a huge disparity in “awful” vs “eh”

It’s better than the mess of a third one anyway

You can almost feel the tension between Raimi trying to make a camp horror adventure and the studio being like “No no, we need a cool moment for Black Bolt from the Inhumans TV show”

Another very telling moment I think was Multiverse of Madness, where *all* the discourse and half the marketing was “who might show up in this Multiverse film????” and then the alt character stuff was the worst part of an otherwise very good movie

People also 100% forget this now but like Cap and Thor etc didn’t become popular and beloved right away at all. Both their first movies had only ~ok receptions, and the OG Avengers is very built around the view that Tony is the one you know and are here for

It’s become representative of the whole post-Endgame mess for me. They did have well received projects out of the gate! They just did nothing with them

It's kind of amazing on its own that we're 5 years on from Shang-Chi, a film that did well and was good, and all we know about 'Untitled Shang-Chi sequel' is that it is supposedly coming.