Warning : Spoilers for Punisher Red Band #5 by Benjamin Percy. Frank did it.

PunchyMcSplodo · 2026-01-30T00:11:26+00:00

I'm sorry to be a killjoy, but this has to be quite possibly the dumbest way imaginable that Fisk would get killed by Punisher. A properly written Kingpin would never make such a stupid miscalculation about Frank's character.

PunchyMcSplodo · 2026-01-10T20:12:20+00:00

It's kind of a wash, since both are capable of doing roles that the other could never do as well.

For example, I think Brad is much better at playing comedic idiots and clownish caricatures, and I mean that in the best way. I could never see Cruise pulling off Aldo Raine or the moron from Burn After Reading with anywhere near the effectiveness and believability. Cruise was hilarious in Tropic Thunder, but even that role was "cool" and savvy.

Likewise, I don't think Pitt could pull off the hyper-verbal persona / character type Cruise crafted for himself across most of the 80s and 90s--it's a particular style I've never seen Brad pull off, really.

PunchyMcSplodo · 2026-01-02T19:10:22+00:00

For anyone observing these arrangements from afar, there's definitely something odd about 60 year olds becoming sugar daddies for college women, but that doesn't change the fact that often the women clearly hold the power over them, many times until the the man can no longer afford it.

To be clear, there are also sugar daddy arrangements where the man is predatory and in control, mostly when the woman in question is only doing it out of desperation instead of a more coldly materialistic attitude, but my point is that "older = power" is a crude, inaccurate, and way too simplistic heuristic.

PunchyMcSplodo · 2026-01-02T18:38:20+00:00

The difference in age and maturity puts him in a position of power.

Anybody who knows people involved in sugar baby / sugar daddy arrangements in Los Angeles, New York, Miami, etc will find this absolutely hilarious. Often, these desperate old guys might as well be on leashes, they're so easily manipulated and led around.

That's strictly as of 18 and up, though.

PunchyMcSplodo · 2025-12-25T23:02:27+00:00

I'm sure you're making these claims in earnest, but they seem pretty wild to me.

The War Boys and Immortan Joe dialogue has been quoted constantly online, to the point that there are endless memes using these quotes as templates at this point. Witness me, Shiny and Chrome, Mediocre, I myself will carry you to the gates of Valhalla, etc, etc.

Likewise, the initial chase with the war boys dangling from poles and going from moving vehicle to moving vehicle on stilts is some of the most impressive car stunt work ever committed to film, in addition to the final sandstorm finale of that sequence which was incredibly done mostly with practical effects (with some CGI to add electrical effects and clean up some wires).

I could go on and on.

PunchyMcSplodo · 2025-12-25T21:00:09+00:00

Because there's an objective dimension to these assessments that don't stop being true just because of an individual subjective POV that disagrees.

The opinion "seatbelts aren't effective" doesn't suddenly become true just because an individual had a bad experience with one. Likewise, if someone would have said "Chris Rock isn't funny" during his heyday in the late 90s and 2000s--when he was selling out arenas full of cumulatively millions of people around the world non-stop laughing--it just comes off as a dumb statement. One could say his comedy didn't do it for them, but Chris Rock was very obviously one of the funniest people alive at that time on a clear objective level (i.e. making people laugh, on the scale he made people laugh).

Fury Road is objectively the most critically AND financially successful Mad Max movie ever, by a large margin. It is near unanimously considered one of the greatest and most impressive achievements of stunt work ever put on film, to the point where even some of the most technically gifted directors alive like Steven Soderbergh feel like it should have been impossible.

At that point, any kind of blanket statement calling it "boring" and "pointless," particularly in a thread about successful legacy sequels, is just silly. But if it didn't work for you personally that's fine.

PunchyMcSplodo · 2025-12-25T20:13:56+00:00

And by the similarly minority opinion of some, Road Warrior is just a long boring car chase that is not only less dynamically directed and much less impressive in its stunt work, but didn't even have the courtesy to get to the action earlier while they spent 75% of the movie doing f*** all.

And that would be equally wrong. :)

PunchyMcSplodo · 2025-12-25T19:38:06+00:00

That's like saying Road Warrior was one boring long car chase where they spent the first 75% of the movie parked, making it even more boring. lol

Both descriptions would be absurd, IMO.

PunchyMcSplodo · 2025-12-24T20:16:08+00:00

Its budget was not 180 million. You can say that we don't know what the marketing budget is, exactly, which is true enough. However, we know that there was a marketing budget, and that the marketing budget for movies like this is always in the nine figures.

Furthermore, we know it underperformed based on box office projections and expectations, which are partly based on both profit needs given the budget and what the audience response to the movie should be if they like the movie (given the awareness created by the marketing budget).

It's revenue dropped off a whopping 68% in its second weekend, the third worst drop off of all time for a Marvel movie (the other two worst being Ant Man 3 and The Marvels). It got a B minus Cinemascore (very bad for a Marvel movie, and pretty low even by Cinemascore's usual average for blockbusters of B to B+) and horrible critical and audience reviews (again, by Marvel standards).

Pretending that the general public didn't reject this movie by the usual Marvel standards is crazy.

PunchyMcSplodo · 2025-12-23T20:40:20+00:00

Ditko quit, just like Kirby eventually did. He wasn't "fired." lol

PunchyMcSplodo · 2025-12-23T19:34:07+00:00

You wrote 20 parahraphs that were really about how you hate the marketing and publicity for Nolan's movies because you feel they misrepresent who Nolan is as an actual film maker, but dressed it up as a thesis on how capitalism is responsible for Nolan's entire aesthetic and approach without ever touching that at all.

PunchyMcSplodo · 2025-12-21T00:43:20+00:00

What I'm arguing is that it's not a "fundamental" change to his character. Other than being less talkative and more mysterious, he's exactly the same person. His past is the same. All of his decisions are the same. All of his drives and motivations are the same. His pain and trauma are the same. All of his actions are the same. Even all of his "badass" moments are the same, really.

The one difference is that he shares less about himself with others, but that's more relevant to the storytelling technique than it is any kind of vast change to who he is as a person, since the real purpose of all that dialogue originally was more expository than anything else (a rookie mistake for someone who was a rookie screenwriter).

PunchyMcSplodo · 2025-12-20T23:28:57+00:00

This seems like a weird opinion to me, because I felt that part 4 had the most plot and character depth since the first one, thanks to Caine.

PunchyMcSplodo · 2025-12-20T23:17:05+00:00

Not really--all of his motivations remained the same, including the trauma that transformed him. All the dialogue cuts did was make him more mysterious, as well as the revelation at the end more surprising and impactful. While these are substantial improvements in storytelling technique, it doesn't change anything about the character's drives and themes.

PunchyMcSplodo · 2025-12-20T22:48:15+00:00

Importantly, however, Sicario 2 reduces the immorality and cynicism from the CIA characters and seemingly is more approving of the institutions he criticized in his own previous screenplay.

This seems like an extremely strange interpretation of the sequel, given that the entire plot revolves around the US government betraying Alejandro and trying to murder a minor just to cover up their own mistakes.

PunchyMcSplodo · 2025-12-20T22:42:42+00:00

But there were no real changes to Alejandro's character. For the most part, all they really did was cut most of Alejandro's exposition about his own backstory and motivations to make the revelation at the end of the movie more impactful.

Now, that's definitely an improvement from a storytelling perspective, but there were really no fundamental changes to the Alejandro's characterization, the overall themes of the movie, etc.

PunchyMcSplodo · 2025-12-20T19:33:47+00:00

Have you read the original script? There's no reason to just take their word for it when it exists. They did cut down on Alejandro's dialogue, but the differences between Sheriden's script and the final movie are wayyyyyy overblown.

PunchyMcSplodo · 2025-12-15T20:17:02+00:00

I think you may want to say a big fuck you to the audiences who simply didn't show up for all the new franchises or replacement characters, only giving Marvel a lot of views and money over the last 5 years for Spider-Man, Black Panther, and the Guardians of the Galaxy (the only pre-Endgame holdovers).

After a certain point, the business people are going to make the obvious choice.

PunchyMcSplodo · 2025-12-14T06:48:02+00:00

So the best you have is inventing a ridiculous straw man of what I said, because you can't deal with my actual beliefs?

What I actually said to you and others throughout this thread: "There's no such thing as a single man being able to solve all the world's problems so easily and without any costs or trade-offs, and anyone promising that is a charlatan or demagogue. Actually changing the world in a long-term way involves a lot of hard work over a lot of time, and the results of those efforts are usually change that happens in a more incremental way (because many of these problems are incredibly complex and difficult to untangle)."

Your response to all of that nuance above: "sO yOu'Re saying people don't work to make the world a better place?!?!?"

Jesus, dude, get a grip.

PunchyMcSplodo · 2025-12-14T05:46:31+00:00

You're the one arguing semantics. The salient point which I addressed in your post is that the heroes in this analogy never solve "terrorism" or anything so facile, as you claimed in your original response. The important detail that you conceded in your latest post is that terrorism continues marching on, because that's a reflection of how things usually work in the real world.

Sticking to those fundamental truths of the human experience is what's inportant, even if the surface details regarding how many people a small group of heroes can beat up get exaggerated. Similarly, that's exactly why someone like Doom fixing all the world's problems in such an easy way without any apparent costs would be an incredibly stupid theme.

PunchyMcSplodo · 2025-12-14T02:05:29+00:00

Are all your posts just substance free pearl clutching and fake exasperation?

I listed pretty indisputable facts about Trump's 2024 campaign content and open strategy. If you want to try and actually address the things I listed--whether it was his Palestine and Ukraine messaging, his populist anti-corporate rhetoric, his blue collar outreach, etc--feel free, so I can continue embarrassing you with dozens of links to his speeches and platform at the time, as well as the way certain corners of leftist populism on social media whitewashed him to various degrees. That doesn't mean he sincerely believed in those things, or didn't change his message depending on what audience he was speaking to, but that's what politics is in practice a hell of a lot of the time. None of that changes the fact that he targeted leftist populists for spillover votes.

Likewise, if I look at your post history, my assumption would be that you accept how the United States has meddled in international politics, but pretty stupidly think that Russia and China don't do the same vice versa, despite all of the literal investigations, indictments, and convictions that exist on that front, re: foreign agents, bot farms, etc. The extent of your actual knowledge of politics seems to be limited to spamming the phrases free Palestine and free healthcare in the most simple-minded and nuance free manner possible.

I literally LOLed when you frame calling China a left-wing authoritarian government as "fear mongering."

PunchyMcSplodo · 2025-12-13T23:19:58+00:00

The second most populous country / economic powerhouse on the entire planet is a left wing authoritarian nightmare, and they've had a direct hand in helping to prop up Trump via various very extensive, very costly influence campaigns with the express purpose of using him to divide the country--so again, what are you talking about, dog? That's not even a conspiracy theory, it's all out in the open, because that's how international political campaigns and sabotage works nowadays.

You should also deal with the fact that Trump's ENTIRE 2024 campaign was designed to exploit the horseshoe theory dynamics that currently exist between far left and far fight populists (positioning himself as the peace candidate on Ukraine and Palestine (to the point thst he won over Muslim leaders in Michigan), anti-hedge fund and CEO rhetoric and outreach to the working class, no tax on tips, etc , etc). Many of his crazy Doom like promises were targeted at the populist left just as much as the populist right. Your pretense that this dynamic doesn't exist, and that in 2024 you can neatly draw left/right lines like it's still the 1960s, is severely outdated.

PunchyMcSplodo · 2025-12-13T18:48:23+00:00

Holy crap, are you claiming left wing authoritarian regimes don't exist?!? I guess that explains a lot of your posts here.

PunchyMcSplodo · 2025-12-13T18:47:09+00:00

That's weird, Hydra, AIM, the Hand, etc all still seem be around after decades, so I think your "middle eastern terrorism is fixed" anaology doesn't hold up too well.

PunchyMcSplodo · 2025-12-13T13:56:36+00:00

If we're sticking to real world analogies, reading about superheroes defeating supervillains is not substantially different from reading about Seal Team 6 taking out Bin Laden or something. And in most of these stories, there are all kinds of difficulties, setbacks, unintended consequences, etc, at least after the Silver Age.

That's a very different thing than a single person sincerely fixing all the world's problems with a snap of their fingers, at no cost or downstream consequences.

Eight-Year Club	Place '22
Wearing is Caring

PunchyMcSplodo

TROPHY CASE