Avengers, Deadpool, Solo, Champions League, NBA playoffs and votes on Brexit legislation. So many big, exciting things happened this month (and boring Brexit stuff) but I missed a lot of it because May is also near the end of the school year with lots of exam things to prepare. I did see Avengers, so I'll talk about that. I also saw the Champions League final (highlights), so I'll laugh about that. I couldn't care less about the NBA, so I won't talk about that. Finally, I will finish with some boring political stuff. Hold onto your butts.
The undisputed king of the box office this month is quite clearly the latest Avengers film. It's early numbers were enormous and I won't be surprised to see it reach $2billion by the end of its run. In all honesty, the success of the film is more down to the way Marvel built up to it over the past ten years than it is to do with the quality of the film itself. I watched it with my wife, in an extremely comfortable new cinema near us, and left feeling rather numb to it all. My wife is a very casual film fan, so she had no idea what was going on or who most of the people were, but she did laugh at the jokes and go quiet during the emotional scenes. One sign that the fim didn't really hit the right notes is that she didn't leave the cinema crying, which she always does if anything sad happens (regardless of how bad the film in). This one should have been a real tear jerker, but everything moved along so quickly that there was no time to pause and let the emotional sledgehammers make any impact. The characters didn't seem to be too upset about anything (making yet another quip within minutes of a tragic event) so why should the audience feel anything? The ending had all of the emotional impact taken out of it by the knowledge that they would never actually kill off characters with future films already announced, so Marvel are obviously going to bring them back in the next one. All in all, the film was yeat another emotionless CGI fest where the stakes were so high that they became meeningless. It was a textbook example of "and then" strytelling but the fact it is making so much money means we're going to get a lot more of it. The art of telling a story and building characters is dead and has been replaced by sheer volume of characters and meaningless spectacle. I'm still going to watch the next one (as I am a completist) but I think this is the beginning of the end of my interest in the Marvel Universe.
So, right after Avengers we got Deadpool, well you got Deadpool but it didn't come out in China so I didn't. I am trying to stay away from Deadpool stories and spoilers so that I can see it when it's released online, so no talking about that here.
How about Solo? Pointless. It's just a boring, paint-by-numbers space adventures with Chewie and some people who have your favourite character's names but aren't your favourite characters. To be fair, Lando is very Lando but his robot partner managed to ruin most of the scenes with him in. The heist the film is based around was a simple job of just walking in and taking something with pretty much no resistance and the rest of the film was convoluted crap written to just fit in a few more easter eggs. It's not a terrible film, but it's not one anyone needs to see and I don't think anyone will. There's a huge debate about Star Wars and Star Wars fans raging on the internet, but it's a false flag operation for left-wing Americans to attack right-wing Americans (and vice-vera) and all very boring, so I won't get into it.
A more interesting event was the Champions League final between Real Madrid and Liverpool. I hate both of those teams, so I didn't really care who won but it was a good laugh to see Karius literally throw the game away. I'm still laughing about it now. Liverpool fans were convinced that they were going to win (despite now trying to claim that they were just happy to be there) so it was wonderful to see them lose in such a dramatic way and to watch the fallout from it. Sometimes, being a football fan can be a thankless task but occasionally the football gods offer up a piece of delicious theatre to remind you why you continue to be so addicted to it.
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Unfortunately May wasn't just a month for cultural events that bring people together, it was also another month of inertia and in-fighting for Brexit. Brexit negotiations are getting nowhere and it's no surprise that this is the case when half of parliament is trying to ruin everything just to make the other half look bad. The most important political event of my lifetime should have been a moment that party politics was put aside for the good of the country, but it has just resaulted in pointless squabbling and point scoring. It's pathetic and the whole thing is going to be a disaster if they politicians don't wake up to reality. Britain's whole negotiating position was hobbled from the start when the government was forced to promise that there would be no hard border in Ireland. Once that promise was made, the EU had no reason to come to the table and negotiaite. They just sit there and as "What about Ireland?" and wait for the British governement to negotiate against itself. A huge strategic mistake which has sunk the entire enterprise. The British need to take that promise off the table and start planning for a no-deal Brexit, or the country will find itself tied to the EU forever. (I'm not saying that the UK should go through with a no-deal Brexit, but it has to be willing to accept that outcome just to get the EU to take these negotiations seriously).
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A pretty drab month, all considered. Mega May was a flop for me, so hopefully June will bring something better. Is a decent World Cup in Russia too much to ask for?
