Marvel Cinematic Universe

Was Ruffalo's character bitten by a radioactive Albert Brooks?

We saw Shang-Chi yesterday and really enjoyed it. Probably the best "first" film in the MCU since GotG.

If they actually tie the events of the "What If..." series directly into the MCU movies I will be inordinately pleased.

It's going to be a

I am not a Dr. Strange fan (I thought the first movie was kind of unnecessary, and didn't care for him in any of the random cameos in other movies), and In The Multiverse Of Madness didn't change my opinion of him.
The cloak is still a more personable character than he is.
Wanda was a villain for... hormonal reasons?
That was a terrible Reed Richards.
I didn't watch The Inhumans , was it the same Blackagar Boltagon?
Bruce Campbell gets his obligatory cameo and is also a more personable character than Strange.
Why was America constantly chased by tentacle demons from the hentai dimension?
It really turned right into Evil Dead 2 in that final act there.

I knew she was being chased by Wanda, I was specifically asking why Wanda chose the tentacle demons from the hentai dimension. Seems an odd choice.

I haven't seen Dr. Strange yet, but Captain Carter fights a tentacle demon from the hentai dimension in the first episode of Who Dis...? and the tentacle demon shows up in a few other episodes.

Reed "Jim from the Office" Richards was terrible and the weird group of people lobbying for it should have been chastened.

I don't give a fuck what anyone else says, I really loved Thor: Love and Thunder!

Finally got around to seeing Multiverse of Madness, and the Black Bolt cameo definitely benefited from my having waited.

Previously, I only knew of Anson Mount from the first season of Hell on Wheels that I hate-watched, and the absolutely awful Inhumans episodes I watched.  Let's just say that from those sources my opinion of Anson Mount was... not charitable.

Since then, however I have watched the first season of Star Trek: Strange New Worlds, and am now a big fan of Anson Mount.  

So when I saw him as Black Bolt, instead of rolling my eyes as would have been my reaction just months ago, I was actually delighted!

Overall I enjoyed the movie a lot more than I did the first Dr Strange movie.  At first I was outright offended at how easily Dr. Strange became Sorcerer Supreme, from finding the mysterious and hidden Kamar-Taj literally fifteen seconds after stepping off the plane, to mastering his magic lessons in about ten minutes.

Now I'm starting to realize he is the embodiment of something I've seen before in gamer groups:  the player who breaks the game because he's so unfamiliar with source material he doesn't even know the tropes he's supposed to be falling into.  He's just like a PC who shows up for a campaign, often a friend or brother of an existing member of the group, has never played RPGs before, and is just handed a character sheet.  He has to be told every step of the way what kind of basic feats he's capable of, and even how things like his equipment list work, but when he gets in an encounter with the bad guys he absolutely breaks all of the DM's plans because he truly doesn't know that fighters fight, wizards wiz, and rogues spend most of their time pickpocketing the other PCs.  So he'll re-animate one of the other PC's dead body to use as a trap detector, attacks a Type IV demon with just a non-magical dagger, or casts that weird spell on his list just because he likes the name and has no idea what it does.  

I thought Black Panther 2 was fine as a comic book romp but a much lesser movie than the original, due entirely to not being as directly political. It has a vague something about resisting colonialism and imperialism, but it only gestures at the idea a bit and the actual central conflict is between one made-up country and another made-up country fighting over a made-up natural resource.

There's a scene in the beginning of the movie where Wakandan soldiers fight French mercenaries trying to steal vibranium, then Wakanda captures these mercs and marches them to the UN to expose the hypocrisy of the UN Security Council classifying Wakandan hoarding of vibranium as a threat to world peace. The conflict over vibranium was the natural consequence of what happened in the first movie and it would have been logical that it be the subject of the sequel, which is why it's massively disappointing that it went where it did instead. We could have had metaphors about rejecting the Central African franc or throwing out Canadian mining companies but instead we got a movie about a flying Mexican guy fighting a superpowered black chick.

I didn't hate the movie, I'm a dork for comic book shit and I actually did dig the whiz bang whale war shit, but we've got lots of comic book movies and zero blockbusters about pan-Africanism (besides the first Black Panther, of course). The first movie made me think, "Hey, Marvel finally learned how to overtly put politics into their movies" but its sequel makes me think, "Oh, it was just a one-off."

Okay, this looks like fun.

It had an A Cinemascore. People who actually saw it liked it fine. The misogynistic shitheads were really, really loud with it, going above and beyond to make it seemed like everyone hated it, while it went on to make a billion dollars.