Keith and Britney are back for a new Hard NOC Life. On today’s episode, they break down all the news coming out of the Deadpool III set, including Jennifer Garner’s return as Elektra and Hugh Jackman’s comic-accurate Wolverine costume!
This week, Britney, Keith, and Dominic are joined by Friend of the NOC, Catrina Dennis to break down the Black Panther: Wakanda Forever trailer, and marvel at Diego Luna and Gael Garcia Bernal’s ascension up the Disney ranks with Andor and Werewolf By Night, respectively. They also geek out over Daredevil’s appearance in She-Hulk and share what’s nerd poppin’ from Star Trek: Picard to Hocus Pocus 2 and “Super” Black Adam rumors.
This episode was recorded before Marvel dropped the Wakanda Forever trailer so tune in next week for thoughts on that! In the meantime, Britney, Keith, and Dominic weigh in on Hugh Jackman’s return as Wolverine in Deadpool III, reported trouble on the Blade set, and the latest She-Hulk and Andor episodes.
Straight from the mouth of the Merc with a Mouth, Ryan Reynolds announced today via social that Deadpool III is set for September 2024! But that’s not all, bub. He’s bringing a very special friend with him!
Continue reading “Hugh Jackman Joins Ryan Reynolds for ‘Deadpool III’”
Like most folk, I’m not too keen on reminders of my ever-increasing age. But this one, well, it’s not too bad of a milestone reminder.
Miles Morales, Marvel’s best Spider-Man, debuted nearly 10 years ago! You read that right, it’s been almost a decade since Miles inherited the Spidey title from Peter Parker and immediately one upped the kid from Queens.
Continue reading “Marvel Celebrates Miles Morales’ 10th Anniversary with Variant Covers”
Hard NOC Life will be going on a brief hiatus. But before it does, Keith and Shawn have to break down the election, its relation to Nerd Pop, and a special announcement about the podcast.
Deadpool 2 premieres this week and it has already been praised for its rated-R comedy and off-the-wall antics from actor and executive producer Ryan Reynolds. Another thing the film is getting praise for is the appearance of a queer couple in Negasonic Teenage Warhead (Brianna Hildebrand) and her girlfriend, Yukio, played by Japanese-Australian actress, Shioli Kutsuna.
The 25-year-old actress has starred in many Japanese films and television shows and made her first international debut in last year’s The Outsider. Now, Kutsuna is playing her most electrifying role yet — X-Men recuit, Yukio.
Continue reading “EXCLUSIVE: Shioli Kutsuna Reveals Her Secret ‘Deadpool 2’ Role”
The “Whitelash” theory of Trump’s super-embarrassing slide into the presidency (well, we never claimed the U.S. wasn’t anti-intellectual, did we?) has the still-ascendant, but demographically shrinking and culturally stagnating white/cis-het/male contingent (helped substantially by their female counterparts) striking back at the diversity of Obama’s America by electing a crypto-white-supremacist in response to his racist and xenophobic dog whistles. Although not the only compelling narrative of the last year and a half, Trump’s Whitelash has enough truth to it to make it into at least a Ronald-Takaki-authored history book, if not a textbook from Texas.
Meanwhile, pop culture may be lashing in the opposite direction — and, in fact, contributing to the panic. Whereas the last Academy Awards shows of Obama’s presidency featured a field of winners that rivaled a wedding-dress-clad polar bear fainting on an iceberg for whiteness, it is President Trump’s first Oscars that saw the Academy — now led by a black woman — crowning its first African-American-made Best Picture. The last season of tv was the most diverse in history, and we don’t need numbers or stats to know this. And even the debate around diversity failures points to how far we’ve come, and how aware of the changing nature of American culture the mainstream has become.
So it’s not much of a stretch to see Logan, clearly the end of a franchise, as the gentle, mournful and mourning, Hollywood-sanctioned version of conservative white panic.
At a time when many comics fans are clamoring for more gender and race representation in superhero comics, one character has been the benchmark for strong women heroes of color for decades. And the X-Men’s Storm is currently receiving a bit of a creative renaissance with Marvel recently launching her first ever solo series.
On the latest episode of Hard N.O.C. Life, guest host Shawn Taylor (@reallovepunk) discusses the importance of the character with an all-star panel: Storm writer Greg Pak (@gregpak), actress Maya Glick (@MayaSokora) — creator of the Kickstarted Storm fan film Rain, and Storm superfan Jamie Broadnax of @BlackGirlNerds.
A while back, I shared a couple of lists I curated of DC superheroes and their Academy Awards. It’s a hobby I picked up a bunch of years ago because I’m as much of an Oscars junkie as I am a superhero movie one. I hinted that I would tackle a similar list featuring the actors of the Marvel Cinematic Universe, but instead, I decided to take on the Oscar winners and nominees from that other multi-movie Marvel megafranchise: the X-Men.
Part of the reason is because X-Men: Days of Future Past just shattered a ton of Memorial Day box office numbers on its way to a $111 million opening. Also, with seven movies spanning fourteen years under its belt, the X-Men franchise is just as deep as the Batman and Superman oeuvres, though the mutants have far less noms and wins than DC’s big two.
Some more stray observations after the jump.
At the beginning of this blog’s life, The Wolverine was a very popular topic. Jenn wrote about her issues with the film — primarily how she felt the movie was yet another example of Hollywood’s exotification of Asia and is essentially an Orientalist fantasy in the spirit of Miss Saigon. Later, Claire rebutted Jenn’s claims of Orientalism in the movie but still thought it sucked because of all the plot holes and poorly drawn characters. We even discussed it at length on Hard NOC Life.
Here’s the thing, though. I liked this movie. Like, a lot. It was probably one of my favorite movies of the summer and is definitely my favorite in the X-Men movie canon (which, I guess, isn’t all that difficult since X2 and the Magneto bits in First Class are the only good ones in the franchise).
Now that it’s out on blu-ray and DVD, I thought it was an opportune time to express why I liked it (even though it seems no one else on the blog did).
In the last week, Marvel Studios released trailers for next year’s slate of superhero fare, and if these teasers are any indication, Warner Bros. is going to have some catching up to do — even if they did manage to shoehorn Batman into the Man of Steel sequel. Still, the only thing interesting about the Batman/Superman movie is that they filmed a football game between Metropolis and Gotham, this time without Hines Ward. Meanwhile, the Marvel Cinematic Universe (via Disney) and the X-Universe (via Fox) are simultaneously laying down the gauntlet for dope movie trailers (we shall see if the actual movies live up to the promise of the previews).
But right now, all we have are the trailers, and they’re both pretty spectacular.
Originally posted at Adam WarRock’s tumblr page.
I bought a bundle of X-Men Vol. 2 issues, 1-79, and I am going to read them all and blog about them here.
Okay, folks. Just to start NOC off on the right foot (i.e. to NOT give you the impression that Nerds of Color are all in agreement), I have to say that I totally disagreed with Jenn’s analysis of The Wolverine.
Well, I disagreed with 75% of it (and I’m not the only one.)
The part I agreed with is that it sucked: The Wolverine was a terrible, horrible, no good, very bad movie … but not for political reasons. I think it was horribly badly written by someone who did not know how to write. Or else horribly hacked up by a director who did not know how to make a movie make sense. Or some of both.
I think what Jenn was doing was filling in the blanks with the products of her own intelligence because the movie was all blanks. And nerds abhor a vacuum.
Here’s what I saw (spoilers ensue):
Continue reading “The Wolverine Sucked for Narrative, Not Political, Reasons”
My boyfriend and I rarely go to the movies these days: tickets are overpriced, concessions are empty calories, 3D makes our heads hurt, and no one seems to follow basic theatre etiquette anymore. But, we make the rare exception for blockbuster movies: any film for which the special effects necessitate a big screen. Earlier this summer, we braved the Friday night mall crowds to check out Iron Man 3. Without fail, we found ourselves seated next to a trio of fanboys who, moments after the room darkened, launched themselves into a loud and obnoxious litany of Mystery Science Theatre commentary on the 15 minutes of trailer, each statement of amateurish snark blasted at full volume so that the entire movie-going audience could “share” in this bit of uninvited “fun.”
When the trailer for The Wolverine came on, MST Fanboy #1 — the fanboy who of the bunch was both loudest and closest to us — let out a shrill squeal. “I so can’t wait for when this comes out! It’s gonna be epic,” he declared loudly to no one in particular between fistfuls from his bucket-sized popcorn, and the rest of us found our lives enriched by the knowledge of his growing excitement about this movie, or at least by a momentary respite from the scathing and unrelenting witticism that he had unleashed upon the other trailers.
(By the time the movie started, it was clear that these fanboys had no plans of letting up. 20 minutes in as Robert Downey Jr.’s Tony Stark led us through his post-Avengers PTSD, we pointedly turned to MST Fanboy #1 and hissed loudly to get his attention. As soon as he turned to us we snapped: “Hey, dude, we can ALL hear you, and you’re not funny enough to justify this. You need to shut up. Now. ” The rest of the movie was enjoyed in much-appreciated silence punctuated by periodic glares of sullen reproach from my left.)
I’ll be the first to admit, I wasn’t one of those fanboys, and not just because I know how to enjoy a movie in respectful silence.
Thanks Keith for creating this site and inviting me! I revised my 2010 Origin Story for 2013. Check it out:
I’ve told this story a million times: when I was young, my father kept me off the streets and saved much needed money buying me the toys I wanted by getting me a library card and teaching me to walk to the Franklin Avenue library, and there began my love of books and stories.
What I’ve written less about is the books I gravitated towards: books about mythological monsters, Greek gods and heroes, King Arthur and the Knights of the Round Table, Lord of the Rings, my older sister’s Elfquest collection and X-Men comic books. And the secret of many a nerd of color from the ‘hood: my lifelong devotion with role playing games such as Dungeons and Dragons, and Vampire: the Masquerade.
