Day: May 4, 2015

While looking through reviews and easter egg posts about Avengers: Age of Ultron, I kept running across posts about someone named Bella Thorne. Now, I have kids of a certain age and as such know a little bit about teen stars. Still, I never heard of her. In fact, I didn’t even really recognize that she was a teen star until, on my fourth article about the future of the marvel shared universe movie franchise (Spidey is coming!), something popped up about her being on the cover of Teen Vogue. Who the heck is Bella Thorne and why should anyone, least of all me, a superhero fan, care? Then it hit me: She’s being media-groomed to play Mary Jane Watson.

Despite Andrew Garfield’s ridiculously impressive turn as the scarlet spider, he will not be returning for what is likely to be a mini-reboot in the shared universe. The Amazing Spiderman is dead. Long live the Spectacular Spiderman! Now comes the difficult part of maximizing revenue by casting individuals sure to fit the target market of this particular brand of Marvel. We know that Daredevil is meant for a certain audience. Avengers is the universal catch-all for the imprint. What about spidey? Some of the early choices fill us in. This will be the teenage spider. In other words, the focus will be on the high school years and that level of intrigue and balancing the dual worlds of teen-dom and fighting with super powered beings… Kinda like the Disney cartoon. Enter then the Disney actress, Bella Thorne. It doesn’t take a genius to recognize that they are betting on the early buzz by talking her up. The algorithm tells us that.

I can’t say much to the math that defines and creates this algorithm, but when we enter the web and look for things, our search history is not only recorded, but monitored to allow some selling agent/advertiser to glom on to what we are searching for and provide us products and even articles related to what it thinks we want. This is how Bella Thorne came into my life. As I said, I previously had no idea who she was. The seventeen year old did not pop on my screen based on a historical preference for redheads (I’m not into that anymore anyhow), she popped up because I am very curious about where Marvel is taking me and Marvel, in turn, is very curious about what the customer base will do when fed bait. I took the bait, purely out of curiosity. I wish I could express that to them, because I’m honestly not impressed with Thorne at all. I don’t feel that she brings the gravitas associated with Mary Jane. The iconic red is as close as Marvel is going to get to Lois Lane, and this girl is no Lois Lane.

So, Algorithm, send me someone else and while you’re at it, spin up a couple of possible male leads. Asa Butterfield, maybe?

 

Some Thoughts:

1. Clever too late, I should’ve named yesterday’s post ‘Orphan is the new black’
2. Back in 1824 Lord Byron shuffled off his mortal coil, leaving us with Don Juan as the great work to remember him by. The poem is particularly interesting because it looks at Don Juan not as the womanizer as he is seen by so many, but as someone who in fact, is more often manipulated by women…

Orphan Black is getting a lot better.

At the head of season 3 the storyline is about the male ‘Castor’ line of clones and more surreptitiously about the Leda line that created our protagonist sisters. My own, albeit limited, understanding of mythology suggests that Leda is the mother of the Dioscuri and as a result the Castor line may in fact be the child strain of the Leda line.

Director John Fawcett has improved as well. The progressions now are linear and make sense in the concept of the story and our natural order of understanding of the clones. As I write this I am preparing to watch ‘Formalized, Complex, and Costly’ which promises to reveal more of the story and develop the personalities of individual characters further.

I look forward to the promise of season three and the promise of original fiction that excites. There are few shows that do that anymore. I’ve grown accustomed to different flavors of the same crap stew. Orphan Black is one of the few that don’t give me that… not yet.

 

Some Thoughts:

1. What fleeting satisfaction racism provides. How much of people’s psyche is built around the idea that they are somehow superior to others and inherently better than one particular racial group? How much of it is unconscious? How much is challenged by the trials of daily life. It is no wonder then that those of racial exclusionism withdraw from society to a place of their own making–much as I discussed in the thoughts yesterday.
2. The last supposed appearance of an Angel that led to the formation of a church was in 1823, which was when the angel Moroni was said to first appear to Joseph Smith. The angel led him to a book written in what Smith referred to as reformed Egyptian, but based on what has been shared about the plates, has no direct correlation to any known human language. How much of this is real and how much is fantasy? No more or less than any other religion I suppose…