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Sadness. But honestly, not everyone who works together will always get along forever.
IDK. Remember when Terry Gilliam trashed Black Panther?
It gives young black kids the idea that this is something to believe in
Yeah because white kids watching Iron Man's adventures is fine, but black kids having an African superhero is not?
Which Monty Python didn't age like milk at this point?
He called out Tony Stark in the same interview:
Where’s the gravity, where’s real gravity? ... It’s the limitations that make life interesting. Okay, so your suit burns up. So you get another suit because you’re Tony Stark.
His criticism was for the whole Marvel body of work. That it implied that they only people who can do anything of value in the world are superheroes with vast resources, superhuman powers, and nominal limitations that disappear whenever the plot requires.
Black Panther was just the recent Marvel film at the time of the interview, but frankly I think it does highlight the exact problems he was talking about: T'Challa is the king of a fictional African superpower country with super science based on a fictional super-material, and in addition to his super-suit based on that fictional super-material, he also has super-powers from a fictional super-drug.
In context of the whole interview, the "bullshit" he doesn't think is worth believing in is pretty clearly the externalization of all significant power and agency onto impossibly powerful fictional figureheads with no actual limitations, no actual struggles, unburdened by reality. It really sounds like he's saying that people in general, kids in general, and yes black kids, should have something more realistic to believe in, which gives them agency, rather than implicitly sloughing all agency onto fictional superhero-kings. And again, he expressed this critique with the genre as a whole, not just the black superheroes.
Idle is great at playing pricky characters, now we know it wasn't an act!
John Cleese is great at playing terrible people and joined GB News.
He's a brilliant comedian but not a very good person. He's hardly alone in this.
And there are far worse out there in comedy. He's pretty much a professional grumpy old man these days.
I think ultimately Cleese is held up as a bastion of British values and stiff upper-lip comedy... his enduring popularity and the onset of tech like social media has allowed people to see through the facade though. I don't think he's an awful person by any means, but just a product of his generation where views and takes on things just won't fly today.
I think if you had Instagram or Twitter back in the 60's and 70's, there's a good chance that even British icons like Bob Monkhouse or Bruce Forsyth or.... god forbid, Jimmy Saville may have had some questionable views or tastes exposed.
A shame really. Maybe social media was a watershed moment for PR.
Curious, I've always felt that it was Cleese who grew into those roles more and more often.
Slammin’ ^_^
this post was submitted on 14 Feb 2024
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